by Grant, Tess
“Mine too,” Kitty said automatically.
The woman glanced at the three kids poking each other with hay wisps. The tall man next to them scanned the trees going by. He pointed out three in rapid succession, but the kids saw none of them.
Kitty checked Sam. He sat on the edge of the wagon. His good mood long gone, he scowled at the white ground sliding past his swinging feet. There’d been too many real families up at the farmhouse—parents with children. Or at least one parent. Not kids with their annoying big sisters. She slid off the bale and crab-walked across the rough boards to him. Plunking down next to him, she wrapped her arm around his shoulder.
He turned his head her way, and she was alarmed to see a telltale shimmer in his eyes. “What do you think Mom and Dad are doing?”
“Not having nearly as much fun as we are.” She tightened her arm around him.
“Are we having fun?” He threw a wisp of hay onto the ground, and they quickly left it in their wake.
Kitty thought of her oh-so-enjoyable afternoon up at the cabin a few days before. This was much better. “Sure we are. Remember how Dad would always choose big trees and Mom said we had to get a small tree this year?”
Sam shrugged. It had been a bone of contention with periodic skirmishes by Sam and Anne since September. Their mother won that battle, at least until now.
“She wanted some Charlie Brown tree. We could put one ornament on it.”
Kitty nodded. “I know. That’d suck. So what do you say we get the biggest tree we can?”
His face brightened immediately. “Really?”
“Huge. Over there.” Kitty pointed toward the acre of tall trees rapidly approaching. Not many families frequented it.
“How will we put it up?”
“We can ask Joe and his dad to help. It’ll be awesome.”
Sam’s feet swung a little wider and his head bobbed with the harness bells. Kitty looked over her shoulder at the family behind her. The mother flipped a thumbs up and smiled again.
This time Kitty grinned back.
The search at the tree farm was long and arduous. Maybe her mom had been right to insist on a small tree, something pre-cut. If Kitty was playing Mom at home, Sam decided to become Dad at the pine farm and morphed into the same exacting Christmas tree taskmaster her father always became.
This one was too small; this one too fat. That one had a crook at the top. This one had a blank spot, and no, it couldn’t just be turned to face the wall. This one had a lot of space at the bottom and, even though that left room for presents, it was just too much. That one over there was already stained rusty, and this nice green one had bendy branches. Finally, Kitty gave up suggesting possibilities and wandered along behind him, watching him measure trees with his arms. He circled around each, sizing up every possible angle.
Finally, he stopped, pointing at a tree. Kitty, checking their footprints in the snow, was pretty sure it was the very first one they had looked at.
“This one? ’Cause once I start cutting, there’s no going back.”
Sam jabbed at it with his finger, and Kitty wondered if she should salute. Dropping to her knees, she wormed her way underneath. Sam would have her usual job of pulling the tree his way to make more room for the saw blade as she sawed. They managed to drop it without killing themselves, although dragging it back to the wagon pickup point nearly did.
Two of the dads already on the wagon helped Kitty load it up. “That’s huge,” one of them said, clapping Sam on the shoulder. “Your dad’s gonna need two or three people to help stand it up.”
“No problem.” Sam clambered onto the wagon, and the father winked at Kitty.
They rattled back across the field of trees. Sam chattered about decorations. Kitty listened with one ear and wondered exactly how she was going to get that monstrosity of a tree home. Why hadn’t she called Joe and his dad first to make sure they could help? They might just end up with their Christmas tree propped against the stair railing on the porch for the entire season. She could use the frying pan for a stand.
The area around the main farmhouse teemed with people. Cars pulled out with trees lashed to the top, and the jiggler that shook loose needles off the branches rattled nonstop, shaking tree after tree. The same men who had helped her load unloaded for her, and she got in line.
Sam held out his hand. “Can I have some money for a hot dog and hot chocolate?”
Kitty dug in her pocket for the bank envelope holding the cash her mother had left her to use for Christmas. She shoved a bill into his mitten.
“Save some for me, buddy.”
He ran off to the little hotdog hut. She watched his hat bob through the crowd until the door shut behind him.
“Up next, honey,” said a woman, and she grabbed Kitty’s tree and pulled it toward the knot of machinery that would package it up. “Looks like you got an eight-foot Frasier fir. We’ll rattle off the dead needles first.”
“What the heck is that?” The voice came from the end of the line of machinery. The tree before Kitty’s had just shot off the line trussed with an encircling string and ready to go on top of a waiting car. “Come look at this, Janie.”
The woman held up a finger to Kitty. “Be right back.” She joined the small crowd around the tree. The voices swirled and mixed in a hum.
Kitty couldn’t pick out every sentence but managed to hear enough to make her leave her tree and join them.
“Do you think it’s a cougar?”
“Nah, not around here. Bear maybe?”
Kitty slid through their ranks. Tying up the branches of the tree had revealed more of the trunk than had previously been visible. Two vicious swipes rent the bark. Claw marks. Pulling off her mitten, Kitty leaned over and ran her fingers down the grooves. Her fingernails slid into the marks as if they had been made for her.
Or as if she had made them.
She needed to head west of Phinney’s cabin.
Straightening, she turned around and passed through the crowd. Something made her glance toward the wagons, some nudge in her brain. Melville sat there, bouncing the bowed handle of a saw idly against his leg. His kids pulled at his shoulders.
He had been watching her.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Kitty trudged through the calf-deep powdery snow, dragging one of Sam’s sleds behind her. A roped circled over ten punji sticks, lacing them in for the ride. The twine cut into her pulling hand, and she switched off to the other. Joe marched behind. His load consisted of the old toboggan from the barn with the remaining sticks. She should add a snowmobile to her list of equipment. What she really needed was to save somebody big—snatch them right out of the jaws of death—so that in their gratitude they could bankroll this operation. GPS, transportation, stadium seats, maybe a shark cage made of silver.
“When do we get to go home and eat sugar cookies?” Joe huffed.
Kitty didn’t have enough breath to answer. Her eyes roved from side to side then jumped farther ahead, trying to find her bearings. Unfamiliar deer track, unfamiliar woods. She needed a safe zone, and she needed it now.
Joe had managed to find them a logging road into the Manistee that was still relatively clear, and they’d run Mr. Z’s four-wheel drive in as close to the Harris site as they dared. She didn’t have the courage to ask Joe’s dad for directions to the clearing where his brother had been killed, so they used the grid coordinates from Mrs. Norton instead.
“There,” Joe said from over her shoulder.
Kitty dropped the rope and massaged her hand. Following his pointing finger, she examined the spot. “Lay it out for me.”
Joe plowed off the path into the underbrush and Kitty walked in his steps. Stomping through a patch of brambles, he stepped into an untouched expanse. “Here.”
The Manistee that ringed the clearing on three sides was not at all like her national forest. Splotches of dark fungus covered the tree trunks and gnarled wrist-thick grape vines climbed over the branches. It was murky and tangled—alien even in
the winter with no leaves to add to the mystery. An ancient oak, at least six feet in diameter, stood on the north side. It split into a double trunk about halfway up. Lightning had taken out the fork on the clearing side. As a result, the base trunk gaped wide open, rotten and black.
This had to be the place. This had to be where both Harris and Joe’s uncle had died. It radiated evil. No wonder the little group who had watched one of their members die and one morph into a monster had sworn never to come back here. Kitty shuddered. Joe couldn’t mean for her to go in there.
Joe walked into the trunk like he was checking out the Keebler tree house, but there weren’t going to be any cookies in there. “Perfect,” he said, rapping on the sides. He started back toward the toboggan.
“It’s horrible,” Kitty said.
Joe pointed east. “The trees are kind of stunted over there. We’ll get good light. It’s not very big, but it’s clear.” He waved his forefinger in a circle. “We’ve got four good lines of sight.”
Kitty barely heard him. The tree still mesmerized her. “Can’t you feel it?”
He stopped in his walk toward the sleds and faced Kitty. “What I feel,” he hooked his fingers around the words in quotes, “is that I’m going to toss my lunch if I have to haul these any farther.” He pulled off his gloves and shoved his coat sleeve up to check his watch. “We have thirty-six hours before we are due back here. In the meantime, I need to buy my girlfriend a Christmas present. Let’s wrap this up.” He jumped the dead ferns and brambles and caught up the rope of the sled.
Kitty took a few steps toward the dark maw. He was right and she was being silly. Why did she feel so bad?
Joe left the sled near the oak and went back for the toboggan. Kitty undid the lacings and picked up a spear. She put the sharpened edge down and shoved. It met resistance at first—underneath its blanket of snow, the ground had finally started to freeze. After she punched the pointed end through the first inch or so of earth, she could push the silver-tipped stick easily. She started to encircle the nest.
Joe yanked at the ropes binding the load on the toboggan. The pyramid crashed sideways. One of the spears caught in the rope and he tugged at it. A crack echoed in the frozen air. Catching Kitty’s eye, he held up the sharpened silver tip that had just snapped off. “Sorry,” he said and wound his arm back.
Kitty reached her hand out, starting, “Don’t throw it…” but it was already sailing, glinting as it flew end over end out of the clearing.
“Oopsie,” Joe said.
It disappeared into the snow. Kitty hoped that wasn’t an indicator of how the rest of the hunt would go.
****
Sam slotted another Christmas movie into the DVD player. There was a real flaw in her plan, Kitty realized now. Namely that Sam would be home alone tomorrow night while she trekked up to that forsaken clearing. Nobody would be out in the woods the eve of Christmas Eve—nobody was going to get killed, infected, or maimed tomorrow. Why didn’t she just stay home?
Maybe she would. She’d pull out the copy of The Christmas Carol her English teacher had handed out for the break and get it read while Sam slept and she ate candy canes. It sounded like a plan. She’d get started tonight.
Kitty retrieved her messenger bag from the entryway. Pawing through the books and notebooks inside, she pulled out the small copy of Dickens. Directly behind it was her government notebook. With a start, she remembered the photo Joe had given her the day the news about her dad arrived. She paged through until she found it.
Joe and Kevin, Stan and Nate.
The names written on the back were separated into twos as if they were familiar groupings for whoever had written them. The uncle Joe looked like her Joe—the curly hair, the easy smile. It was easy enough to see.
But Kevin…who did he look like? Kitty’s dad had blonde hair, as did Sam. This guy had to be some shirt-tail relative…a cousin forty-seven times removed. He was tall with dark hair and even smiling his eyes looked serious. He didn’t look like an Irish at all. The only one who had dark hair—other than Anne—was Kitty herself.
The bottom dropped out of Kitty’s stomach, and she sat down hard at the dining room table. Placing the photo in front of her, she splayed her hands across it. Dark hair, serious eyes, tall. She began to rock, and her finger twined in her bangs.
Mr. Z’s words came from far away. “You are so much like him,” he had said. “Every time your dad looks at you, he must see him.”
She’d thought he’d meant Phinney, but that wasn’t who he was talking about at all.
“Sam,” Kitty yelled, jumping up from the table and grabbing her coat. “I have to run out to the workshop. I’ll be right back.”
Kitty ran out of the house, Maddie at her heels. The only old photos she knew of were in the workshop, tacked to the walls. Why was the house sterilized?
The door knocked back against the wall as she threw it open. She let it swing as she searched the photos. One of Kitty holding a fish she had caught, her smile missing two teeth. One of Anne holding Sam, a chubby toddler. Mr. Z. and the high school baseball team. Kitty scanned them, moving fast.
It was tacked near the top of the grouping—two boys in swim trunks holding tubes in front of the river. Kitty pulled it down. She compared it to the photo in her hand. The boys were younger but the same. On the back were written the words ‘Nate and me.’
The writing was familiar—dark and slanting even then. Kitty went to the drawer with the maps and sorted through until she found the letter Mr. Z. had delivered so long ago. Unfolding the paper inside the envelope, she spread it out next to the picture of the swimming boys. Kitty was no expert but it was the same.
Nate and me.
I saw what you did.
She had blamed Melville for the letter but he’d never sent it. Kevin Irish had.
Kitty’s eyes dropped to the cluster of numbers—9706 0780—below the line of text. Now she knew why the Harris grid coordinates from Mrs. Norton looked familiar. The numbers matched. Kevin’s were only more precise, which made sense. He’d been there before.
Had he known she was looking for the Harris site? Or had he been trying to show her what being Phinney’s apprentice did for you?
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Joe arrived around six on the twenty-third.
“Have you got a cover story?” Kitty asked him. “’Cause I got nothin’.”
Joe hung his coat in the entryway and held out a DVD.
“A Christmas Carol? That’s it?”
“I told them we were going to see it at Classics Night in town. We watch it here, get a few quotes, go hunt werewolves, head home and pretend we saw it on the big screen.”
“That works,” Kitty said. “I’m going to be loaded up on Dickens by the end of the season. Reading it for the lit section in English. How’s Sam doing up there?” She’d decided to go simple in terms of Sam and sent him to spend the night with Joe’s little brother, Eric.
Joe heeled his boots off on the mat. “I sure hope you got him that game he’s been wanting. Don’t bother picking him up if you didn’t.”
Kitty grinned. At least she’d gotten that right. “Already wrapped and hidden away.”
Joe bent his head down for a kiss. “What have you got to eat around this place? I’m starving.”
“Are you kidding?” Kitty beckoned him to follow her into the kitchen. “My culinary skills—or lack thereof—must be legend in this town. People have been sending food over left and right since Mom left.”
Kitty pulled the fridge open but a bark from Maddie stopped her. Kitty cocked her head, listening. Another car had driven in. While Joe dug through the loaded shelves of the refrigerator, she went back to the entryway and watched a girl climb out of the driver’s seat. Jenna. She collected a cardboard box from the passenger’s seat.
Kitty opened the door before she knocked and Jenna looked startled. “Hey,” she said.
“Come on in.” Kitty opened the screen door for her.
Joe came into view with a loaded plate. “Got more food? I’m on my way to the microwave.”
Jenna flapped a hand at him, warning him to stay away. “This is all for Christmas morning.” She lifted up a cardboard container and set it down on the table. “Mom sent over a carton of orange juice, a breakfast casserole…”
Kitty craned her neck to see. “Don’t say fudge. I think we have six pounds of fudge.”
Jenna pulled plastic containers and pans out of the box, squinting through the lids before she set them down. “No. No fudge. Cinnamon rolls.”
Kitty sighed. “Perfect.” Grandma Bell’s rolls were to die for, huge and covered with glaze. She tried to catch Jenna’s eyes, but her friend studied the floor. “We were going to watch a movie.”
“Can I talk to you?” Jenna lifted her gaze. “Maybe Joe too?”
****
Between the three of them, they’d decimated at least a pound of fudge. Joe picked crumbs off the plate while Kitty tried to recap the conversation. “So you thought because we were fighting that was the end of everything?”
Jenna shrugged. “I was really mad at you. You were so weird this summer. You promised to come to the games to see me and you never did.”
Kitty protested. “I tried to apologize. You said it wasn’t a big deal.”
Joe banged the plate down and waved a hand between them. “Ladies, ladies. Let’s cut to the chase. We all fight, Kit ends up with me, and Jenna ends up being friends with a girl who is not really her friend. Is this accurate?”
Kitty nodded and Jenna said, “Pretty much.”
Joe continued, “And now we would like to let bygones be bygones and continue as we were before this strange interlude?”
The girls nodded.
“Sounds good.” Joe tilted his chair back and eyed the kitchen counter. “Let’s seal it with fudge.”
The corner of Kitty’s mouth curled up. “Ugh. I’ll blow up if I eat any more.” Besides it isn’t all good. She steeled herself and asked, “What happened the night you didn’t come home on time? Your mom called here.”
