The Winter People (29 page)

January 31, 1908

For the past three days, I have been a prisoner in my own home.

It was quite a scene when Martin and Lucius came back from town and found me waiting with the shovel over Gertie’s grave. The air was frigidly cold. My fingers and toes were numb from standing outside, waiting. Still, I kept firm hold of the shovel as the men climbed out of Lucius’s carriage and approached. I was standing right over the place we’d buried her, the wooden cross with Gertie’s name carved into it teasing, taunting.

“What are you doing, Sara?” Lucius asked, his voice low and soothing, as if he were talking to a small child.

I explained the situation to him as calmly as I was able. Told him about the note, the crucial clue in Gertie’s pocket. Surely he would see reason.

“Put the shovel down, Sara,” Lucius said, moving toward me.

“We need to dig her up,” I repeated.

“We’re not going to do that, Sara.” He was closer now. I knew he intended to stop me. So I did the only thing I could think of—I raised the shovel and I swung.

Lucius jumped back; the shovel just grazed his coat. Martin was on me, wrenching the tool from my hands.

It took both men to carry me inside.

“We need to see what’s in her pocket!” I cried. “Do you not care that our girl was murdered?”

Lucius ripped up a sheet and tied my arms and legs to the bedposts. Restrained me like a madwoman. And Martin allowed it, assisted him.

Lucius says I am suffering from acute melancholia. He explained that Gertie’s death was too much for me to bear and that it has caused me to lose touch with reality. He said that in this state I am a danger to myself and others. I bit my tongue until it bled, knowing that if I argued it would be a further sign of my supposed madness.

“And these ideas that Gertie is visiting, leaving notes for her?”

Martin asked, running his hands through his hair.

“Hallucinations. The sick part of her mind compelled her to write the notes almost as if to convince herself. What she needs is rest. Quiet. And she mustn’t get any encouragement that these fantasies are real. Frankly, Martin, I think the best place for her at this point would be the state hospital.”

Martin pulled Lucius into the hall, spoke in frantic tones. “Please,” I heard him say. “A little while longer. She may still come back to us. She may still get well.”

Lucius agreed, but only on the condition that I stay under his watchful eye. Now he comes often to check on me and to give me shots that make me want to sleep all day. Martin comes and spoon-feeds me soup and applesauce.

“You’ll get well, Sara. You’ve got to get well. You rest now.”

It’s all I can do to fight to stay awake. But I know I must. I know that if I sleep I might miss my Gertie if she chooses to return.

Today is the seventh day since her awakening. There are only hours left before she disappears forever. Please, please, I wish and beg, let her return to me!

“How are you feeling?” Lucius asks when he comes up to see me.

“Better,” I tell him. “Much better.” Then I close my eyes and drift away.

This afternoon, he untied me from the bed. “You be a good girl, now,” he said, “and we won’t have to put these back on.”

I am expected to stay confined to my room. I am not allowed to have company. Amelia has come visiting, but Martin won’t let her upstairs. Lucius says that it would be too much excitement. Martin
warns that if I don’t show improvement, if I continue to insist that these visitations are real, I will be sent to the State Hospital for the Insane.

“There will be no more talk of messages from the dead. Or of Gertie having been murdered,” Martin says.

I nod like a good, obedient wife. Puppet-on-a-string wife.

“And no more writing in that diary,” Martin said. “Give it to me.” So I handed him my book and my pen. Luckily, I had foreseen this and was holding an out-of-date diary, full of the trivial details of my life before: entries about baking a pound cake, attending a church supper. Martin did not even think to look through it, and tossed it into the fire before my eyes. I made a show of being upset, and Martin, he looked quite pleased with himself for performing this heroic act to help save his mad wife. But there was something frantic about it at the same time. These last few days, there is something in Martin I’ve never seen before—this sense of desperation. Of panic. I sense that he is trying so hard, with such determination, not to save me, but to keep me from the truth.

What is it that he does not wish me to know?

Is this delusional thinking, as Martin and Lucius would have me believe, or am I the only one who sees things clearly?

The papers and journals containing all my notes and diary entries since the time of Gertie’s death have been safely hidden away. I have a distinct advantage over Martin: I grew up in this house. As a child, I discovered and created dozens of hiding places by loosening bricks and floorboards, making secret compartments behind the walls. There are some hiding places that I am convinced no one could ever find. I have craftily hidden all my writing, scattering it among several hidden niches—that way, if he chances upon one, he won’t get everything. And now I only write when he is out in the fields, one eye on Martin through the window, one on my diary.

A
n amazing thing has happened! Just now, this evening, I was pretending to be fast asleep when Martin popped his head in. Afterward I heard him shuffle down the stairs, get his coat, and go out the front door. It was just getting dark—the bedroom full of long
shadows; the bed, dresser, and table barely discernible. I imagined he’d gone to feed the animals and shut them in for the night.

I heard a scraping, scuttling sound from the closet. I turned, held my breath, waiting.

Could it be true? Was my beloved girl back?

“Gertie?” I called, sitting up in bed.

Slowly, the closet door creaked open, and from the darkness within, I saw movement. A flash of a pale face and hands moving deeper into the shadows.

“Don’t be frightened, darling,” I told her. “Please come out.” It took all of my will to stay where I was, not to leap from my bed and run to her.

More scuttling, then the sound of quiet footsteps—bare feet padding along the wooden floor—as she moved out of the closet and into the room.

She moved slowly, almost mechanically, with little stops and starts like a steam engine hiccoughing. The gold in her hair shimmered in the darkness. Her breathing was quick and raspy. And there was that smell I recalled from years ago in the woods with Hester Jameson: a greasy, burning sort of odor.

I nearly fainted with joy when Gertie sat down beside me on the bed! There was no lamp lit and the room was dark, but I’d know her shape anywhere, though she was different somehow.

“Am I mad?” I asked, leaning closer, trying to get a better look. I saw her in profile, and her face was slightly turned away from me. “Am I imagining you?”

She shook her head.

“Tell me the truth,” I begged her. “Tell me what really happened. How did you end up in that well?” My fingers ached to touch her, to get lost in her golden hair (was it shorter?). But somehow I knew I mustn’t. And perhaps (I’ll admit it now, to myself) I was a little afraid.

She turned to me, and in the darkness I could see the flash of a toothy smile.

She rose and went to the window, put her two pale hands against the frosty pane of glass.

I stood up and moved to the window beside her, squinted out
into the darkness. There was a crescent moon rising. Martin was coming out of the barn with a shovel in his hand. He glanced up at the house, and I ducked like a child playing hide-and-seek. He must not have seen me, because he kept walking, crossing the yard.

I knew just where he was going.

I turned to Gertie, to ask her what I was supposed to do next, but she was gone. I looked back to the window, and there were the ghostly imprints of her two hands, left behind in the frost.

January 31, 1908

Sweat gathered between his shoulder blades as the shovel bit into the crusty snow. He had to dig through eighteen inches before even hitting dirt. He worked as quickly as he could, scooping and dumping.

His bad foot ached in the cold. His breath came out in great pale clouds. The snowy yard looked blue in the dim moonlight.

Faster, Martin. You’ve got to do this quickly. You mustn’t hesitate. You mustn’t be a coward
.

“I know,” he said out loud.

Behind him, the house watched. Sara slept, dreaming her mad dreams. Over to the left, past the barn, he could see the outline of the hill, the tips of the rocks of the Devil’s Hand, dark specks against the snow.

He looked back down at the wooden cross he himself had built, her name carefully carved across the top:

G
ERTRUDE
S
HEA
1900–1908
B
ELOVED
D
AUGHTER

His hands shook. They were greasy with fear-sweat, the shovel slipping.

Faster.

The slanted shadows of the slate gravestones beside hers watched, seemed to shift impatiently in the moonlight: her infant brother, grandfather, grandmother (for whom Gertie was named), and uncle, watching, wondering,
What are you doing to our little Gertie? She’s one of us now. She doesn’t belong to you
.

For days now, Martin had stared out at little Gertie’s grave, knowing what he must do.

He had to find out what was in her pocket.

Sara had been babbling to Lucius, insisting that Gertie was murdered and that there was proof in the pocket of the dress she’d been buried in, talking nonsense about ghosts and spirits. Who else might she tell, given the chance? How long until someone listened to her and realized that, behind the madness, there might be a horrible, hidden truth? Until Sara was accused of murder? He needed to see what, if anything, was in little Gertie’s pocket.

Martin gripped the shovel tighter. The soil was strangely loose and soft under the blanket of snow. The shovel moved through it like a warm knife through butter. It shouldn’t be this easy, but it was.

Two weeks ago, he’d lit a fire to thaw the ground enough to dig a hole. He’d stood all day—a father in mourning—feeding it scraps of wood, cut-up deadfalls from the orchard. Shapes had leapt out of the flames at him, taunting: the well, the fox, Gertie’s hair hanging from a nail. He threw in one branch after another, trying to feed the hungry flames, trying to burn away the pictures he saw there.

The soil over the grave was still dark with ashes and lumps of charcoal.

How deep down was she? Six feet? Seven?

A foot for each year of her life.

He thought of the warning he’d given Sara days ago:
Have you thought about the … condition her body will be in?

Oh yes. Martin had thought about it. Dreamed about it. Gertie looking up at him, flesh falling away from bones, little teeth still pearly white, mouth open as she breathed the words
Why? Why, Daddy? Why?

“No choice,” Martin said out loud. He redoubled his efforts, digging faster, harder. The pile beside the grave began to grow.

And what was it he hoped to accomplish? If he dug her up, found something of Sara’s in her pocket, what would he do?

Hide it? Protect his wife?

Or would he show it to the sheriff, have Sara locked away for good?

Mad or not, Sara was all he had left.

For weeks now, he’d been going over that day in his mind, trying to remember every detail: the fox, the trail of blood through the snow. Had he heard Gertie call him? Had he heard anything at all? Had there been someone else out there in the woods? There was the old woman, but no—that had only been a tree.

Part of him refused to believe that Sara was capable of hurting Gertie, not even in a spell of madness. Gertie was everything to Sara.

His shovel made a clunking sound as it hit wood: the top of Gertie’s coffin. The coffin that he and Lucius had made from pine boards he’d been saving to build a new chicken coop in the spring.

“What are you doing, Martin?”

Martin spun. Sara was behind him, shouldering his Winchester rifle, aiming for his chest.

She shook her head, clicked her tongue. She was wearing her nightgown, but had pulled on her overcoat and boots.

He froze, shovel in hand. “Sara,” he stammered. “I thought … you’re supposed to be resting.”

“Oh yes. Poor, ill Sara, with her cracked mind, needs her rest, doesn’t she? If not, we’ll tie her to the bedposts again.” She grimaced.

“I …” He hesitated, unable to say the words.
I’m sorry. So sorry for all of this
.

“What is it you’re looking for, Martin? What do you think is in Gertie’s pocket?”

He looked down at the rough wood. “I have no idea.”

She grinned, kept the rifle pointed at his chest. “Well, then, let’s find out, shall we? Keep digging, Martin. Let us open the coffin and see what we find.”

He carefully cleared away the rest of the dirt, brought the lantern
close to the edge of the hole, and jumped down into it. Feet straddling the small coffin, he took out his hammer to pry the lid off. But the nails slipped easily out of their holes. His hands trembled so hard that he dropped the hammer before grasping the wooden edges of the top and pulling.

What he saw made him cry out like a little boy. He went cold from the inside out.

Empty. The coffin was empty.

What had Sara done?

Sara smiled down at him, moving her head from side to side like a snake. Her skin glowed in the moonlight, as if she were made of alabaster.

“You see, that’s the problem, Martin. If you want to look in Gertie’s pocket, you’re looking in the wrong place.” Holding the rifle in her right hand, she displayed her left, fingers spread. There, above her wedding ring, was the little bone ring. She used her thumb to turn it around her finger, the strange ring she’d once seemed so afraid of.

“Where did you get that?” Martin asked.

“It was in Gertie’s pocket.”

“Impossible,” Martin stammered. He moved toward her, began to climb out of the hole.