The Winter People (17 page)

Katherine’s apartment was at the north end of Main Street, just before the juncture with Route 6. Her neighborhood consisted of stately old Victorian homes that had been converted to apartments and offices. She passed a dentist, several lawyers, an environmental consulting company, a bed-and-breakfast, and a funeral home.

Farther down Main Street, she walked by a sporting-goods shop with snowshoes, skis, and parkas in the window. There was an old, faded painted sign on the side of the building, just above a window with bicycles hanging in it:
JAMESON
’
S TACK AND FEED
.

Next she came to the old junk shop. No doubt it was full of the kind of sepia-toned portraits of strangers long dead that Gary had loved. It was an obsession she’d never understood.

“Each photo is like a novel I can never open,” Gary had explained once. “I can hold it in my hand and only begin to imagine what’s inside—the lives these people might have led.”

Sometimes, if there was a little clue on the photo—a name, date, or place—he’d try to research it, and when they sat down for dinner at night, he’d tell her and Austin excitedly about Zachary Turner, a cooper in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts, who was killed in the Civil War. Austin would listen intently, asking his father questions as if these were people Gary actually once knew:
Did he have a dog, Papa? What color was his horse?
Gary would make up answers, and by the time dinner was finished, they’d created a whole life for this long-dead stranger: a happy life full of horses and dogs and a wife and children he loved very much.

Feet thoroughly soaked now, Katherine paused to look in the junk-shop window: an antique gramophone, a Flexible Flyer sled, a silver trumpet. A fox stole was wrapped around the shoulders of a battered-looking mannequin. The fox had a sunken face, small, pointed teeth, and two scratched glass eyes that stared out at Katherine and seemed, at once, to know all of her secrets.

The bookstore couldn’t be more than half a mile away, but it seemed impossibly far. The cold bit at her face and at her hands in their thin gloves. Her eyes teared up, crusting her lashes with ice. She felt like an Antarctic explorer: Ernest Shackleton, trudging across a bleak frozen landscape.

She got to the bridge over the river and stopped to rest along the sidewalk, hands on the rail, staring down into the brown water, half frozen at the edges. Something moved along the right bank, just below the bridge, a sleek dark shape pulling itself along. A beaver or muskrat, maybe—she didn’t know the difference. It humped its way across the ice and dove into the water, then was gone.

Katherine turned from the half-frozen river and forced herself to move forward, shuffling across the bridge, continuing down Main Street, her hands and feet numb now, her whole body hollowed out. She thought of the little brown creature, how surely and smoothly it had entered the water, how it had barely made any ripples. It was perfectly adapted to its environment. She, too, would have to find a way to adapt. To move through this new landscape with smooth ease. It would start, she decided, with a trip to the sporting-goods store for proper boots, coat, hat, and gloves.

She passed a yoga studio, an ice-cream shop, and an out-of-business florist. There were signs taped up in all the shopwindows, on lampposts and bulletin boards, showing a photo of a local girl who had gone missing: sixteen-year-old Willa Luce. Last seen wearing a purple-and-white ski jacket. She left her friend’s house on December 5 to walk the half-mile home and was never seen again. Katherine looked at the girl’s smiling face—short brown hair, a smattering of freckles, the glint of silver braces on her teeth. Maybe she’d turn up. Maybe she wouldn’t. Sometimes bad things—terrible things, even—happened.

At last, she arrived at the bookshop. The bell on the door jingled cheerfully. The store was warm and smelled of old paper and wood. She was instantly comforted. The worn floorboards creaked under her feet. She wiggled her fingers, trying to get feeling back.

She passed the front tables of staff suggestions, bestsellers, and new releases, and made her way toward the counter, where a man with a beard and a green wool vest was typing on a computer. But she stopped when she spotted the poetry section. She and Gary used to read poetry out loud to each other in bed on lazy mornings: Rilke, Frank O’Hara, Baudelaire.
All the great dead men
, Gary called them. He loved poetry and had even written a short verse as part of their wedding vows:

Katherine
. Gary again, his voice just behind her now. She spun, thinking if she was quick enough she might catch a glimpse of him, but there was nothing. Not even a shadow.

There was an old photograph on the wall. She stepped closer and saw that it was a picture of the West Hall Inn, dated 1889 at the bottom, a large brick building with white shutters and an awning. It looked strangely familiar.

“This whole block was once the inn,” the bearded bookseller said when he noticed her looking at the picture. “Here, where the bookstore is, was the dining room and bar. The windows are all the originals”—he pointed to the front of the store—“though I’m afraid everything else has changed beyond recognition.” Katherine glanced from where he was pointing back to the photo, finding the same details there.

“If there’s anything I can help you with, just give a holler,” the man said.

“As a matter of fact, there is,” she said. She pulled her copy of
Visitors from the Other Side
out of her bag.

“Do you have anything else by her? Or about her?”

He shook his head. “Afraid that’s it. Though they say there are missing journal pages out there somewhere.” He had a little glimmer in his eye. “She’s kind of a local legend, and, like all good legends, you can’t believe half of what you hear.”

“So she lived here in West Hall?”

“She sure did.”

“Does she have family around still?”

He scratched his head, seeming slightly puzzled by the increasing intensity with which she spoke. She was wearing her good coat and boots, but her hands were covered in paint and, she realized now, she’d forgotten to brush her hair. If she wasn’t careful, word would spread fast through the small town of the madwoman who’d just moved in.

“No family. All the Harrisons and Sheas died off or moved away years ago.”

“So there are really no other books about her?”

He gave her a sympathetic shake of the head. “It’s surprising, I know. I mean, her story has all the makings of a blockbuster movie—heartbreak, mystery, the undead, gory murder—but the only folks who ever come around asking more are grad students, people who are into the occult, and the occasional oddball drawn to the case because of all the gruesome details.” He eyed her as if trying to decide which category she fell in.

“So what else can you tell me about her?” Sara asked.

“What exactly is it you’d like to know?” He had an odd expression, like he was asking her a trick question.

She thought a minute. What
did
she want to know? Why had she taken the trouble to come out in the cold to learn about a woman she’d never heard of until yesterday?

She had that feeling she got when she was doing her art and suddenly discovered the missing piece that ties everything together: a tingling in the back of her neck, a crazy buzzed-rush of a feeling that spread through her whole body. She didn’t understand the role that Sara Harrison Shea, the ring Gary had given her, or the book he had hidden would play, but she knew that this was important, and that she had to give herself over to it and see where it might lead.

“It says in the book there were lost pages, the ones she was working on just before her death. Were they ever found?”

He shook his head. “The truth is, they may not have existed. Sara’s niece, Amelia Larkin, contended there were diary pages missing, but she was never able to produce them. Supposedly, she tore Sara’s house apart looking for them.”

He took off his glasses and gave them a quick polish. “Of course, there are all sorts of rumors about those missing pages and what they contained. Some people claim they’ve seen the pages, that they were secretly auctioned off for over a million dollars back in the eighties.”

Katherine laughed. “Why on earth would anyone pay a million dollars for a few pages from a diary?”

The bookseller gave a sly smile. “You’ve read the book, haven’t you? All that about awakening sleepers? Some people think that Sara
Harrison Shea left very specific instructions for bringing the dead back to life.”

“Wow.”

“I know. Crazy. But I guess people believe what they want to believe, isn’t that right? Anyway, if she did have this knowledge, it certainly didn’t do her any good. I guess maybe you can’t perform the magic on yourself.”

“So her husband murdered her?”

“Well, that’s debatable,” he said.

“Debatable?” Katherine asked, moving closer to the counter.

“There was never a trial. There was never even much of an investigation. All we’ve got are a few solid facts, the stories from the people who were around back then passed down to their descendants. There’s no paper trail—it’s all oral history. What we know is that Martin’s brother—the town physician, Lucius Shea—arrived for a scheduled visit that evening. Sara had not been well and had been under his care. When he arrived, he found the door wide open, but there was no sign of either Martin or Sara. He went around back and found them out in the field. Sara was …” He hesitated, looked down at the painted wooden floorboards.

Katherine gave him a questioning look.

“Go on,” she said. “I’m not squeamish.”

He took in a breath. “Her skin had been removed. Martin was beside her, covered in blood, holding a gun, babbling incoherently. Do you know what the last thing he said was? He told his brother it wasn’t he who had done this—that it was Gertie.”

Katherine felt her jaw drop, then snapped it closed. “The daughter? But she was dead, right?”

“Yes. Absolutely true.
Unless
”—he paused for dramatic effect—“unless you believe the rest of the story Sara tells in her diary, of bringing Gertie back to life.” He leaned forward, looking like an excited little boy telling a ghost story. He studied her, searching her face to see if she might possibly believe such a thing.

“Unfortunately, Martin shot himself before anyone could ask any further questions.”

Katherine’s head was spinning. “What do
you
think?”

The man leaned back and laughed. “Me? I’m just a bookseller
who has a fascination with local history. It’s probable that Martin killed his wife. But a lot of people who were around back then, and even people these days, they say different.”

“What do they say?”

“They think that there’s something out there, in the woods at the edge of town, something evil, something that can’t be explained. There have been a lot of stories over the years, folks who’ve gone missing, people who say they see strange lights or hear crying sounds, tales of a pale figure roaming the woods. When I was a boy, I thought I saw something myself one time: a face peering out at me from a crack between the rocks. But I moved closer and it was gone.” He made his eyes dramatically wide and gave a little chuckle. “Have I scared you yet?”

Katherine shook her head.

“Well, then, let me add another layer to the story. A lot of odd things happened in town shortly after Sara was murdered.”

“What kind of things?”

“Clarence Bemis, the closest neighbor to the Sheas, he had an entire herd of cattle killed—woke up one morning and found their throats slit. The largest steer, he’d been cut right open and had his heart removed. Then—Martin’s brother, Lucius?—he dumped a gallon of kerosene over himself early one Sunday morning, walked right to the center of Main Street, and lit a match.”

“I don’t understand what—”

“Folks said they saw a woman slip out the back door of his house just before he came out and lit himself on fire. The people who saw her swear it was Sara Harrison Shea.”

Katherine gave an involuntary shiver.

“A lot of deaths that year. Freak accidents and illnesses. Children falling under wagon wheels. A fire burned down the general store and killed the shopkeeper and his family. And people kept swearing they saw Sara. Or someone who looked just like her.” He smiled at her. “That’s West Hall history in a nutshell—a lot of ghost stories and legends, very few solid facts.”

Katherine was quiet a minute. She studied a display of large paperback books by the register.
Then and Now: West Hall, Vermont, in Pictures
.

“Is this a book on local history?” she asked, picking up a copy.

“It’s put together by the Historical Society, but it’s mostly just a collection of photos. You won’t find anything about Sara in there.”

“I’ll take it anyway,” she said, thinking it was only right to buy something after taking up so much of the man’s time. He rang her up and she paid.

“Thank you,” he told her, handing her a paper bag with the book inside.

“No, thank
you
. Really. You’ve helped a lot.”

“Anytime,” he said, going back to his computer.

She turned to leave, then stopped. “You don’t believe any of it, do you? The things Sara wrote about in her diary?”

He smiled, folded his hands together. “I think people see what they want to see. Sara’s story is pretty amazing—everything she went through. But think about it: if you’d lost someone you love, wouldn’t you give almost anything to have the chance to see them again?”

T
he bell on the door jingled as Katherine left the shop and headed for home, her coat done up, her thin scarf pulled so tight it was nearly strangling her.