The Winter People (37 page)

“Then this seems right,” Fawn said. She slipped off the small backpack she’d been carrying, opened it up, pulled out the journal pages, and handed them over. “I think you should be the one to do it,” she said, seeming suddenly like a much older girl, a wise old lady trapped in a child’s body. “You’re related to her.”

Ruthie took the pages in her hands; the ink was faded, the paper stained and wrinkled, splattered with Candace’s blood. There, in slanted cursive, were her distant aunt’s words. The instructions for creating sleepers she’d copied from Auntie’s letter.

She traced the sentences with her finger, thinking that her own birth parents, Tom and Bridget, once held these in their hands, believing they were going to change the world, get rich, make a better life for their daughter.

Then there were the pages Gary found: Auntie’s letter to Sara, the map she had drawn, more notes from Sara.

It was all there—Sara’s story, Auntie’s story. Ruthie’s own story, even.

The story of a little girl named Gertie who died.

Whose mother loved her too much to let her go.

So she brought her back.

Only the world she came back to wasn’t the same.

She
wasn’t the same.

Ruthie dropped the papers into the well one at a time, watching them flutter like pale, broken butterflies, like snowflakes, down, down, down, until she couldn’t see them anymore.

“This means no more can be made, right?” Fawn asked.

“Yeah,” Ruthie said, watching the last page fall. She knew, in that moment, what she would do. She would stay in West Hall and help her mother as guardian of the hill, keeper of its secrets. She smiled as she thought of it, how it seemed so simple really, like something that was meant to be; like destiny, after all.

Then, sensing movement, Ruthie turned just in time to catch a glimpse of a little girl in ragged clothes with a pale face peeking out from behind a tree.

She smiled at them, then slipped back into the shadows.

Katherine stared at the words on her computer screen. She had the memory card from Gary’s Nikon plugged in and was studying Gary’s photos of the missing diary pages, Auntie’s letter, and the map.

How bizarre it would all seem to someone looking at it for the first time, someone who hadn’t been to the caves, who hadn’t seen what Katherine had seen.

Losing these pages forever seemed criminal, a terrible waste. At the very least, they were of historical significance. She had a friend, a sociology professor at BU, who might enjoy having a look at them. And wouldn’t the man she’d met at the bookstore in town love to get his hands on a copy?

With a few keystrokes, she shrank the map showing the way to the cave entrance at the Devil’s Hand to postage-stamp size and pushed
PRINT
. While the laser jet did its work, she glanced down at her own hand, at the bone ring on her third finger: Auntie’s ring. Auntie the sorceress. Auntie, who could bring back the dead.

The ring had been Gary’s last gift to her.

To new beginnings
.

She stood up, stretched. The day had flown by, as time often did when she was lost in her work. It was nearly ten o’clock at night, and she hadn’t eaten either lunch or supper.

The page printed, she carried it over to the art table and cut
out the tiny copy of the map. She’d been finishing up the newest assemblage box since she got back to the apartment in the wee hours of the morning. The outside was painted to look like bricks; there was a door in the middle, and a neat sign above that said
LOU LOU
’
S CAFÉ
. To the left of the door, a large window made of thin Plexiglas. Katherine pulled open the door and could almost imagine the smells inside: coffee, freshly baked rolls, apple pie. There, sitting at a table in the center of the café, was the tiny Alice doll. Across from her sat Gary in miniature, wearing the good black pants and white shirt he’d left home in that morning.

I’ve got a wedding to shoot in Cambridge. I should be home in time for dinner
.

And in front of him, his last meal. A turkey club sandwich and cup of coffee. Not an exciting meal, but she knew it was Gary’s favorite—his standard order at diners and truck stops—and it pleased her to be reminded that the Gary who sat in Lou Lou’s that day was the same Gary she’d known all along.

Using a superfine paintbrush, she applied a dab of glue to the back side of the tiny map, and reached in with a pair of long tweezers to stick it onto the table, beside Gary. The map he’d followed to get to West Hall, to the hill, and to the Devil’s Hand, where he’d photographed a little girl who’d been dead over one hundred years.

As she smoothed the Gary doll’s white shirt, she imagined that last conversation: Alice begged him to forget everything he’d discovered, to let it go. And Gary, who had been walking around for the past two years dazed and furious and full of pain over the seemingly impossible loss of his son, thought only of Austin—that if there was the slightest chance to have him back, even if only for seven days, he’d give anything for that.

How bright and full of wonder and magic the world must have seemed to Gary on that last day as he sat in Lou Lou’s Café. That he lived in a world where it was possible for the dead to awaken and walk again—what a miraculous discovery! What hope he must have felt, glowing all warm inside him.

And had he thought of Katherine, of what her face might look like if he brought their son home to her once more? How pleased she’d be. How amazed.

“I understand,” Katherine said out loud, stroking the little doll’s head. “I understand why you did what you did. I’m just sorry you didn’t tell me any of it.” And then, because she needed to say them, needed to say the words out loud and feel their weight leave her once and for all, she added, “I forgive you.”

She closed the door of the café, leaving them to circle through that conversation again and again: Alice trying to convince Gary to forget the whole thing, Gary telling her he just couldn’t.

Behind Katherine, a small sound.

A scratching at the front door to the apartment, as if a dog or cat wanted to be let in.

She rose from the stool, floated across the room, and paused for a moment, her hand on the doorknob.

Her heart sang.

Gary
.

July 4, 1939

Independence Day

The midnight trips to town have grown more difficult. My eyesight is failing. My bones and joints ache all the time. The other day, I caught sight of my own reflection in the stream and did not recognize the thin old woman who looked back at me. When did my hair become so gray? My face so heavily lined with wrinkles?

It pains me to think of what will happen to my beloved Gertie when I am gone. She will go on living forever. My time in this world is limited.

And, as old as she may get in years, she is still only a child and makes a child’s plans and choices.

Who will be here to keep her company, to help her control her impulses, once I am gone?

“Are there others?” she wrote into my hand one night not long ago. “Others like me?”

I was not sure how to answer. I had reflected on the question before, and decided that surely, in all the years people had been making sleepers, she could not have been the only one to spill blood. “There might be,” I told her. “But if there are, they are well hidden.”

Secretly, I pray she is the only one.

It seems that she needs to feed every few months. She grows angry and withdrawn, then weak, and we must venture out in search of food. I have brought her squirrels, fish, even a deer on
occasion. (How ironic that the hunting and trapping skills taught to me so long ago by Auntie are the very skills that have enabled us to survive.) I leave the offerings outside the cave and go take a long walk while she feeds. She does not wish me to watch (nor am I able to stomach it). The truth of it is, the animals I bring do not satiate her. What she longs for most (how I shudder to write it!) is human blood.

I have brought her this, too.

I shall not share the details of my crimes here—they are too horrific to mention. Suffice it to say that if there is a Hell, the Hell Reverend Ayers always warned us of in his sermons, that is where I belong, where they will find me in the end.

It shames me to say it, to confess all that I have done, but Gertie is, after all, my creation.

My child by birth, and my sleeper awakened.

Thanks to Dan Lazar, who pushed me to go bigger, to paint on a wider canvas; to Anne Messitte, for sharing my vision and finding ways to improve upon it; to Andrea Robinson, for her sharp eyes and keen insight; and to the whole team at Doubleday—I’m thrilled to be working with such an amazing bunch; and finally, to Drea and Zella, for, well, for everything—I couldn’t do any of this without you.

Jennifer McMahon is the
New York Times
bestselling author of six suspense novels, including
The One I Left Behind
,
Island of Lost Girls
, and
Promise Not to Tell
. She lives in Vermont with her partner, Drea, and their daughter, Zella.

Visit:
www.jennifer-mcmahon.com

Like:
www.facebook.com/JenniferMcMahonBooks

For more information, please visit
www.doubleday.com

The One I Left Behind
Don’t Breathe a Word
Dismantled
Island of Lost Girls
Promise Not to Tell