Mrs. Cobb chuckled, her cheeks growing even more pink. “Good heavens, no,” she said. “The spirits don’t manifest themselves to us that way.”
“How, then?” I asked.
“Various ways,” Amelia said. “We meet once a month and ask any spirits who are present to join us. Sometimes we will request a certain spirit.”
“But how do they communicate with you?” I asked.
“Rapping on the table. They can answer questions that way—one knock for yes, two for no.”
My throat tightened as I remembered talking with my beloved Gertie this way only yesterday.
“Sometimes they can communicate through Mrs. Willard,” Amelia explained. “She’s a medium, you see. A very gifted one.”
“A medium?” I looked at the old woman, who hadn’t taken her eyes off me.
“The dead speak to me. I’ve been hearing their voices since I was a little girl,” she said. Her eyes were so dark, so strangely hypnotic, if I looked into them for too long, I began to feel dizzy.
Parched, I reached for the crystal glass, took a swallow of cloyingly sweet wine.
“The message your Gertie has for you is this,” Mrs. Willard said. “She says to tell you the blue dog says hello.”
I gasped, put a hand over my mouth.
Mrs. Willard nodded knowingly and continued. “She also says that this thing that you are doing is not right. She doesn’t like it at all.” Her look turned sharp, almost angry.
I set my glass down carelessly, and it toppled. I stood to blot the spilled wine from the table with my napkin and swayed dizzily, steadying myself on the edge of the table. The room felt dark and airless.
“Aunt Sara, are you all right?” Amelia asked.
“May I have a glass of water?” I asked.
“Yes. Please, sit down. Why, your face has gone white.” Amelia hurried over with water, dampened a napkin, and began to dab at my forehead.
“I’m afraid I’m not well,” I whispered to her. “Could you please take me home?”
“Of course,” Amelia said, helping me to rise and making apologies to the ladies.
Once outside, I took in gulps of cold air until my head felt clearer. The sun was directly overhead, and made the world seem impossibly bright. Amelia helped me into the carriage and laid the blanket over me.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Perhaps it was all too much.”
“Perhaps,” I told her.
The other luncheon guests crowded together in the open doorway, waving their goodbyes, brows furrowed with concern. As we pulled away and moved down Main Street, I saw other faces watching, too. Abe Cushing peered out from the window of the general store and raised his hand in a wave. Sally Gonyea was wiping down tables in the dining room at the inn. She stopped and watched us pass, her face somber. And across the street, Erwin Jameson watched us from the window of the tack-and-feed store. When he noticed that I saw him, he looked away, pretended to be busy with something near the window.
I know what they are all thinking: There goes poor Sara Shea. She’s no longer in her right mind.
When we returned home, Amelia insisted on putting me to bed and offered to go find Martin.
“No need,” I told her. “I’ll just rest awhile. I’m feeling much better, really.”
As soon as she left, I jumped out of bed and searched the house again, more frantically than ever.
I kept hearing Mrs. Willard’s words: This thing that you are doing is not right. She doesn’t like it at all.
What had I done wrong? How had I scared my Gertie off?
Unsure of what else to do, I put on my coat and walked through the woods to the old well, but I found no trace of her. It was a miserable sight, looking down into the darkness at the bottom of that circle of stone, like peering down the throat of a hungry giant.
The whole time I was up on the hill, I felt as if I were being watched. As if the trees and rocks themselves had eyes. As if the branches were thin fingers scrabbling against my face, waiting to grab hold of me.
“Gertie?” I cried out from the center of a small clearing just behind the Devil’s Hand. “Where are you?”
The great rocks that formed the hand cast shadows over the snow—long, thin shadows that turned the fingers into claws. And there I was, in the middle of them, trapped in their grip.
I heard branches breaking. Footsteps behind me. I held my breath and turned around, arms open wide to catch her, to hold her tight. “Gertie?”
Martin stepped into the clearing. He had a funny worried look in his eyes. He was carrying his rifle. “Gertie’s gone, Sara. You simply must accept that.” He moved toward me slowly, like I was an animal he was afraid of startling.
“Did you follow me?” I asked, unable to keep the venom from my voice. How dare he?
“I’m worried about you, Sara. You have not been well. You’re not … yourself.”
I laughed. “Not myself?” I tried to recall the Sara I’d been weeks ago, when Gertie was alive. It was true, I had become a different person. The world had shifted. My eyes were open now.
“Let’s go back home, get you into bed. I’ll get Lucius to come this evening to take a look at you.”
He put his arm around me, and I flinched. I flinched at my own husband’s touch. He gripped tightly and led me, as if I were an uncooperative horse.
We said nothing as we walked past the Devil’s Hand, climbed back down the hill, through the trees and orchard, across the field, and back home. He led me upstairs, to our bedroom.
“I know you haven’t been sleeping well at night. A nice rest will do you good,” Martin said, his hand clamped tight around my arm. “Perhaps your trip into town for lunch with Amelia was too much for you.”
As we entered the bedroom, we saw it.
Martin froze, his fingers digging into my arm. I gasped, childish and fearful.
The closet door stood open. There were piles of clothing strewn all around the room, as if a great storm had passed through. A closer look showed that it was all Martin’s clothing. And it had been torn apart, each garment sliced and ruined. Martin’s eyes were huge, furious, and disbelieving. I watched as he leaned down to pick up the sleeve of his good white Sunday shirt, clutching it so hard his hand trembled.
“Why would you do this, Sara?”
And I saw what I had become to him: a madwoman, capable of furious destruction.
“It wasn’t me,” I cried. My eyes searched the closet, finding it empty.
I turned toward the bed, thinking to look under it. There, amid the remains of Martin’s ruined overalls, was a note written in childish scrawl:
Ask Him What He berryed in the field.
I picked up the paper, holding it gently, as if it were a wounded butterfly. Martin snatched it from my hand and read it, his face bone white.
“The ring,” he stammered, looking at me over the top of the paper. “Just like you told me to.”
But there was a little twitch I’d seen before. The same barely recognizable flinch in the muscles around his left eye that he gave after Christmas, when he promised he’d buried the ring back in the field. And here it was again, that little involuntary quiver that told me he was lying.
Katherine
No one knew where the egg lady was.
Katherine walked around the high-school gymnasium several times, but saw no one selling eggs. The wooden floor was covered with rubber mats to protect the surface from wet boots. The gym was horribly crowded, the sound of people talking a deafening buzz in her ears. People in colorful layers jostled her, shouted greetings to one another, hugging and laughing. A whole community connected, and there she was, the stranger in the dark cashmere coat, moving like a shadow among them. She circled the market behind a family—husband, wife, two boys, one of whom looked to be about eight—the age Austin would be if he were alive. The boy begged his father for a cider donut, and his father bought one, then broke it in half, making him share it with his younger brother. The boy scowled beaut
ifully and shoved his half of the donut into his mouth in one glorious bite, letting crumbs dribble down his chin.
Katherine’s eye went to the wall of paintings in the left corner, near the double doors in the back of the gym. They were done in vivid colors and were playful, yet haunting. There was a couple dancing on the roof of a barn while a wolf-faced moon stared down at them. Another showed a man with antlers in a rowboat, gazing longingly at the shore. She turned and continued walking around the gym.
A group of teenagers were gathered in front of the back doors, sharing a bag of maple cotton candy and laughing; they all looked nearly identical in their tall boots and bright ski jackets. She passed a wooden-toy maker, a table from a local apiary selling honey and mead, piles of root vegetables and squash, coolers full of hand-stuffed sausage, a display of sweet rolls and breads, and a table of Unitarian Universalists doing a quilt raffle.
The vendors Katherine talked to didn’t seem to know a thing about the woman with the braid except that she was the egg lady and she knit beautiful warm socks. Katherine stopped to ask a woman in the corner who was spinning wool into chunky brown yarn.
“Oh, you mean Alice? I don’t know where she could be. She’s here every week. Never misses a market.”
“You don’t happen to know her last name, do you?” Katherine asked.
The woman shook her head. “Sorry, I don’t. Brenda Pierce, the market manager, would know, but she’s gone to Florida to be with her dad for open-heart surgery. Check back next week. I’m sure Alice will be here. I’ve never known her to miss a market.”
Alice,” Katherine said, back in her apartment, holding the tiny doll she’d fashioned yesterday from wire and papier-mâché.
“I may not have found you, but at least you have a name now.”
She’d given the four-inch-high doll a long gray braid (embroidery floss) and dressed her in tiny blue jeans. She wore a bright sweater that Katherine had crocheted from turquoise and yellow yarn.
Katherine set Alice down in her box and went into the kitchen to find something to eat.
Alice, Alice. Go ask Alice. Alice down the rabbit hole.
Where are you, Alice?
She’d have to wait. She’d go back to the market next week—surely the egg lady would be back by then. If not, she’d talk to the market manager, get Alice’s last name, maybe even her phone number, if she got lucky.
She heated up some soup and made a cup of coffee. Outside, the late-afternoon sky darkened, and snow was beginning to fall more steadily.
After finishing her meager meal, Katherine dug around in her purse for her cigarettes, pulled one out, and lit it. She noticed the paper bag under her purse: the book she’d picked up yesterday.
She slid it out and opened it up. The first page showed a map of West Hall in 1850. The page opposite it showed West Hall in the present day. There were a few more streets, new churches and schools, but, really, Katherine was surprised at how little had actually changed. The town green was right where it always was, gazebo in the center.
Gary would have loved this, the maps and photos pulled together to show the history of a town.
She flipped through and found photos of Jameson’s Tack and Feed, Cushing’s General Store, the West Hall Inn with its stained-glass windows. Next to all of these were photographs of the same buildings in the present day: the sporting-goods store, the antique shop, Lou Lou’s Café, the bookstore. It was odd, how recognizable each building was still, though the signs outside had changed, the roads were paved, and there were sidewalks with benches where hitching posts once stood.
Katherine took a drag of her cigarette and continued to page through the book. Here was a team of horses pulling a giant roller to flatten the snow along the roads, and beside it, a present-day picture of the town garage with two huge orange snowplows. Here were two photos that showed different generations of the same family collecting maple sap, one with tin buckets, the other with miles of plastic tubing. Next came a dirty crew of men outside a sawmill that was now a craft gallery; then a sepia-toned photograph of rows of children with serious faces standing in front of a one-room school-house, and beside that a photo of the current school, West Hall Union, a low brick building built in 1979.
She turned the page and came to a photo showing a group of young men and women on a plaid blanket, with a huge rocky outcropping behind them: five stones rising from the earth. Picnic at the Devil’s Hand, June 1898, read the hand-lettered caption. Beside it, a photo of the same rocks, the woods behind them taller and denser, and without picnickers: The Devil’s Hand today.
She flipped to the next page. A white farmhouse with a long driveway, a barn behind it, and plowed fields off to the left. In the corner, more hand-lettering: Harrison Shea house and farm, Beacon Hill Road, 1905.
Katherine set her cigarette down in the ashtray and reached into her bag again for Gary’s copy of Visitors from the Other Side. She turned it over to compare the farmhouse Sara stood in front of to the one in the picture from the new book; they were a match.
She looked back down at the book of photographs, her eye on the opposite page: Harrison Shea house, present day. The house looked nearly identical: same black shutters, brick chimney, and front steps. The barn still stood, but the fields were overgrown, the woods closer. Just to the left of the driveway, in the front yard, a woman and two girls tended a large vegetable garden. The photo was taken from the road, and it was hard to make out too many details, but the woman, bent over, had a long gray braid and wore a brightly colored shawl.
Katherine’s heart pounded. Was her mind playing tricks on her? She blinked and looked over at her worktable, where the Alice doll sat waiting in a tiny version of Lou Lou’s Café. Then she turned back to the photo in the book, squinting down, half expecting that the woman with the braid wouldn’t be there—that she’d imagined it. But there she was, hunched over next to a little girl in overalls and a taller girl with dark hair. Could this woman between them with her head bent down possibly be Alice, the egg lady?
“Beacon Hill Road,” she said out loud, flipping back to the front of the book, where the maps were. There it was. You just had to follow Main Street west out of town, take a right on Lower Road, which took you over the brook, and then the next right was Beacon Hill. On the 1850 map, there was only one farmhouse drawn, though left unlabeled, about halfway down Beacon Hill Road before it intersected with Mountain Road. Just to the north of that single house on Beacon Hill Road was a hill, and at the top of the hill were the words Devil’s Hand.
She checked the modern map and found Beacon Hill Road in the same place, and there, on the hill beyond, the Devil’s Hand. Mountain Road was now Route 6, of course.
It might be a wild leap, but it was something. And, aside from waiting until next week to try the farmers’ market again, she really didn’t have any other ideas for tracking down the egg lady.
She glanced out the living-room window; it was fully dark now. How was she going to know if it was even the right house? Wouldn’t it be better to wait until morning, to do this in the light of day?
No, she decided, reaching for her bag and keys. This was perfect, really. She’d drive out there, and if she found the right house, she’d go and knock on the door, tell them she’d gotten lost in the bad weather, or had had a little car trouble. Find out what she could that way. Maybe it wasn’t even Alice’s house, but belonged to some other woman with a long gray braid.
One way to find out.
She stood up and went to the closet to get her coat.
Ruthie
It was an uneventful morning, which put Ruthie on edge—everything felt normal except for the absence of her mother, looming over everything like a hazy film, giving the whole day a blurry, unreal feeling and a bitter saccharine aftertaste.
It was Saturday, and though Ruthie thought about going to the farmers’ market to sell eggs in her mother’s place, she decided dealing with all the questions she’d get wasn’t worth the hundred or so buck
s she’d make. Buzz was working at his uncle’s shop and wouldn’t get off until late.
The girls spent the morning puttering around the house, peering anxiously out the windows, Ruthie willing the phone to ring. Ruthie washed the dishes. Swept the floor. Fed the chickens and collected eggs. Kept the fire in the woodstove burning. She did all the things Mom would do, and did them as Mommishly as she knew how. Fawn followed Ruthie from room to room, never letting her big sister out of her sight. She hovered right outside the bathroom door when Ruthie went in to pee.
“I’m not going anywhere, you know,” Ruthie told her.
Fawn shrugged, but continued to shadow Ruthie’s every move.
At least a dozen times, Ruthie decided she was going to call the police, but every time, she stopped herself at the last minute. What if her mother and father were involved somehow with the O’Rourkes’ disappearance? What if that crazy lady in Connecticut had already called the police about Ruthie showing up on her doorstep? And she would have to tell them about the gun, right? There was no way it was licensed or legal. And Fawn—they would definitely take Fawn away, wouldn’t they? No way they’d leave Fawn in this house with illegal guns and no one but Ruthie to care for her. And still she clung to the idea that her mother would just show up, with a perfectly good explanation—“I’m so sorry I worried you, but …”—and God, she would be furious if Ruthie had caved and called the police.
Tomorrow morning, Ruthie promised herself. If her mother wasn’t home by then, she’d call the police for sure. First thing.
They made a stew with beef from the chest freezer in the basement—Ruthie had been relieved to see there was enough meat in there to last them for months. There were still plenty of potatoes and onions down in the root cellar, too.
But they couldn’t go on like this for months, could they? As the day crept by, Ruthie allowed herself to wonder what would actually happen to them if Mom never returned. There was nearly two hundred dollars in the coffee can in the basement. Not much, but they wouldn’t need much. There was no mortgage on the house—really, they just had to pay for food, utilities, gas for the truck, supplies for the chickens. Ruthie knew she could run the egg business on her own. She had always resented all the work she was forced to do in their huge vegetable garden, but she knew they could get a lot of food out of it—she and Fawn knew how to start seeds in the spring, how to construct a trellis for the peas, when to harvest garlic. Mom had taught both girls to bake bread and can tomatoes and beans. Ruthie could get a part-time job in town. They’d get by. If they had to, they’d find a way.
The Winter People Page 16
