The Winter People (21 page)

January 26, 1908

This morning, I waited until Martin left the house, then hurried to the closet. I knocked on the door—tap, tap, tap—but there was no answer.

“Gertie?” I called out. “It’s Mama.” Slowly, I turned the knob, which felt cold in my hand. The door creaked open. In the half-light of morning, I saw that she was gone.

I pushed aside my drab dresses, Martin’s shirts, but there was no sign of her. No proof that she had ever been there at all.

The closet looked so empty.

“Gertie?” I cried out again. “Where have you gone?”

I searched the house, the barn, the fields and woods. But my Gertie was always so good at hiding, at fitting herself into such tiny, unlikely places, that she really might be anywhere.

Perhaps she is playing a game, I told myself. Hide-and-seek. I kept turning corners, opening doors, looking under furniture, waiting for her to jump out and surprise me.

Boo.

I was hauling everything out of the front-hall closet when Amelia arrived late this morning.

“Aunt Sara,” she said, kissing my cheek and glancing at the pile of coats and shoes I’d pulled out. “How delightful to see you up. And you’re cleaning?”

“I’m afraid I’ve lost something,” I told her.

“Sometimes things have a way of turning up once we stop looking for them,” Amelia said, her eyes dancing with light. “Do you not find that to be true?”

“I suppose you’re right.”

“Now, you must come to lunch with me! I have a surprise for you—something wonderful. I’ll help you put all of this away, and we’ll leave at once.”

“I don’t know,” I said. What if my Gertie should return while I was out?

“It’ll just be for a couple of hours. I think it’ll do you a world of good. Uncle Martin thinks so, too. Though you must promise not to tell him about the surprise—I think he’d be quite upset with me!”

“All right, then,” I agreed, reluctant to leave, but curious about the surprise.

The ride into town was pleasant. The sun was out, and Amelia has a lovely new carriage with red leather seats. Amelia fussed over me, making sure my coat was buttoned all the way, covering me up with a blanket as if I were an invalid. She chattered brightly about this and that—girlish gossip I was not listening to. My eyes were fixed on the woods that lined our road, searching for movement in the shadows, some trace of my little Gertie.

“Are you listening, Aunt Sara?”

“Oh yes,” I lied. “It’s all very lovely.”

She gave me an odd look, and I thought that I really must try harder.

A
melia married Tad Larkin last spring—the son of the mill owner here in West Hall (one of the wealthiest families in town). They live in a big house at the end of Main Street.

When we arrived, we were met by four other ladies, all strangers to me. They were very friendly and enthusiastic. I was quite taken aback. There were a Miss Knapp and Mrs. Cobb from Montpelier, Mrs. Gillespie from Barre, and a very old woman with a birdlike face—Mrs. Willard—but they did not say where she was from. All the women had on lovely dresses and hats trimmed with lace and feathers.

“Amelia has told us so much about you,” they chirped as they led me through the parlor, with its ornate furniture and oil paintings on the walls, and into the dining room, where the table with a pressed white tablecloth was all laid out with a fine lunch—little sandwiches cut into triangles, potato salad, pickled beets. The places were set with bone china, crystal glasses full of something that bubbled. The wallpaper was dark blue with flowers that seemed to wink and sparkle.

“She has?” I sat down and began serving myself as food was passed to me, wondering what Amelia had been thinking—how could she imagine I might be up for so much socializing? What I wanted more than anything was to beg to be taken home, to resume my search for Gertie.

“Indeed,” said the youngest, Miss Knapp, who couldn’t have been much older than eighteen.

I picked up a chicken-salad sandwich, nibbled at the corner. My mouth felt dry, and chewing was difficult. I put down the sandwich, picked up my fork, and tried a bite of the beets; their taste was as sharp and metallic as blood. I felt the eyes of all the women on me. It was simply too much.

“But she’s not the only one who has told us things about you,” said Mrs. Cobb, pouring tea. She was a plump woman with a ruddy face. “Isn’t that right, ladies?” she practically chortled. It was as if they all shared a joke.

They all nodded excitedly.

“I’m afraid I don’t understand,” I confessed, setting my fork down on the china plate. It made a terrible clanking sound. My hands began to tremble.

It was the old woman, Mrs. Willard, who spoke. She was sitting across from me, staring fixedly at me. “We have a message for you.”

“A message?” I asked, dabbing at my lips with a starched napkin. “From whom?”

“From your child,” Mrs. Willard said, her dark eyes boring into my own. “Gertie.”

“You … you’ve
seen
her?” I asked. Was this where my Gertie had gone? To these ladies? But why?

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
.

W
hen 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.

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 beautifully 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.