Near the Bone

by Christina Henry

  “It wasn’t in the back,” C.P. said. “I would have noticed.”

  “Maybe he put it behind the storehouse,” she said.

  “I’ll look after I have some more magic bean water,” he said.

  “Magic bean water?”

  “Coffee,” he said.

  “You say a lot of funny things,” Mattie said, then covered her mouth with her hand, shocked that she’d said that out loud. “I’m sorry. That was rude.”

  “Nah,” he said. “I bet a lot of things sound funny to you. You’ve been here for a long time, and I don’t see a TV or a radio or anything. Or even books.”

  “I’m only allowed to read the Bible,” she said, and she hated how she sounded when she said this, like a docile cow herded into a pen.

  “Well, if we can fix up the sled for Jen then we can get out of here and try to find the packs again and then get off this mountain, or at least get to where there’s a cell signal again. I had a spotty signal for a while, but it was closer to the base. If I can call 911 and give them our location then we’ll be saved. Someone will come and get us with a helicopter or ATVs or whatever.”

  He used that word a lot, whatever. It was a strange word, vague but at the same time full of possibilities.

  After eating the eggs and bacon, C.P. ripped open the box of coffee cakes and dumped the wrapped cakes on the table.

  “Here, try one,” he said. “They’re not as good as a real home-baked coffee cake but they’ll do in a pinch.”

  Mattie picked up a cake and started unwrapping it, then stopped.

  “Where does he get all the money for these things?” she said.

  “Does he have a job?”

  “No,” she said. “He’s always here, unless he’s hunting. And speaking of money . . .”

  She dropped the cake on the table and went over to the couch, kneeling in front of it and reaching underneath for the roll of money she’d hid there yesterday. For a moment she thought William had found it but then her fingers brushed against paper and she grabbed it.

  “What are you doing?” C.P. asked, his mouth full of coffee cake. Mattie had a sudden idea that he was eating to hide his grief—that if he kept eating, kept busy, then he wouldn’t have to think about what happened to Griffin.

  She held up the roll of bills. “William left this in his trousers the other day. I hid it, because I thought if I got away from him I would need money.”

  C.P. tilted his head to the side, studying her. “I didn’t think you had the guts for something like that, to be honest. When we first met you, you were such a scared little mouse.”

  Mattie felt her cheeks reddening. “You were two strange men wandering around our property, and I hadn’t seen anyone other than William in years. You can’t blame me for being cautious.”

  “That wasn’t caution. That was terror.”

  “Are you trying to make me angry?” she said, standing up. She felt something in her chest, something bubbling and boiling.

  “I don’t know. Can you even get angry?”

  “I’m sure I can,” Mattie said, stung by the way he dismissed her. “I think I am now.”

  He held up his hands. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I have to stop treating you like a regular person, I know. You haven’t had the same life as everyone else. If Jen was awake she’d definitely be beating me about the head and shoulders right now.”

  William grabbing her shoulders. William’s fist in her face.

  “You shouldn’t joke about things like that,” she said. “I know that you’re trying to be funny so that you don’t think about your friend, but it’s not funny at all.”

  C.P. rubbed his face with one hand. “Yeah, you’re right. It’s not funny. I’m sorry. For real. I’m sorry. It’s not like I’m not sitting here looking at your black eye and the marks around your neck. They just kind of faded into the background, and I forgot who I was talking to. Let’s see how much you’ve got there.”

  Mattie had forgotten about the money, even though she was holding it in her hand. She was still angry, still felt the bubbling and the boiling at the edge of her consciousness, but she recognized that he was sorry if he said so. He was foolish and awkward and often said the wrong thing, but he was sorry. She handed the money to C.P., who unrolled it.

  “Holy crap!” he said. “These are mostly hundreds.”

  He started counting the bills, putting the different types into piles. When he was done he looked up at her, his expression dazed.

  “There’s $2,517 dollars here,” C.P. said. “Where did he get all of this money? Is he rich?”

  “I don’t know,” Mattie said. There was so much she didn’t know about William. There was so much she still didn’t know about herself, huge chunks of her life that were missing, puzzle pieces that had no connector.

  “I could buy a train ticket with that, right? And pay for a place to stay?”

  “You could buy a plane ticket with that, never mind a train,” C.P. said.

  “A plane,” Mattie said. She’d never been on a plane, not even when she was a child. She remembered longing to fly, longing to be so high up in the sky that everyone below was smaller than an ant. “William could never find me if I was in a plane.”

  “Don’t you worry,” C.P. said. “That guy is going to be arrested once I can call the police. Your case is really famous, you know? It’s probably not something you want to be famous for, I guess. But you went missing and your mother was killed in a really brutal way—not to be mean about it or anything, I know it’s probably upsetting for you. There was a big search for you. It was on every TV station. And every year on the anniversary of your disappearance there are stories, you know, ‘what happened to Samantha Hunter,’ those kinds of things.”

  “Samantha Hunter,” Mattie said. “I forgot that name for a long time. William told me my name was Martha, and he called me Mattie.”

  She paused, taking a deep breath before going on. “In all those times that you heard those stories—did they ever say anything about Heather? About my sister, Heather?”

  C.P. frowned. “I don’t remember anything about her. They always talk about you and your mom and they always show this same clip from around the time you were taken, of some guy, your mom’s boyfriend talking about . . .”

  Realization lit his face. “Your mom’s boyfriend—it was that guy! The guy who kidnapped you! He was talking to reporters, acting like it was such a tragedy, and that he didn’t have any idea what had happened. The police interviewed him, I remember now, and they searched his house and everything but they didn’t find any sign of you and they had to eliminate him as a suspect. What did he do, stash you somewhere while he was off pretending to be worried about finding you?”

  “You have to stay here while I’m out,” William said. “I can’t trust you not to run away.”

  Mattie looked at the floor, at the small multicolored rug that covered the area behind the couch. There wasn’t a rug anywhere else in the cabin.

  “He put me in the Box,” she said.

  “The Box?”

  “The Box is for bad girls who try to run away,” she said. Her voice sounded very distant to her own ears. “I was always trying to run away at first, and he had to put me in the Box so I would learn how to be good, to listen and to obey.”

  She walked toward the rug as if in a dream. C.P. pushed his chair back and followed her. She sensed his uncertainty. He didn’t know what to do or how to respond. Mattie pulled up the rug to reveal a trapdoor in the floor. She tugged the ring to open the door.

  Underneath was a wooden, coffin-like structure, narrow and long. It hadn’t been used in many years, and it was dusty inside. The corners had the remnants of spiderwebs and their prey, the shells of dead, desiccated insects.

  “He put you inside here?” C.P. sounded like he was going to be sick again. “And left you
here?”

  “Yes. When I was bad.”

  “You weren’t bad. You were a little girl, and you were scared, and you wanted to go home.”

  He sounded angry, but Mattie wasn’t afraid of his anger the way she’d been before. It wasn’t anger that could hurt her. She’d gone away again, away to a place where she was safe and she didn’t have to think about the door closing over her head.

  “Hey,” he said, tapping her shoulder with one finger. “You weren’t bad. You didn’t deserve this. Nobody deserves this. Except maybe that sicko. I’d like to see how he’d like it if someone shoved him in a wooden box.”

  Something broke inside her then, some tide of fear and hurt that she’d been bottling up for longer than she could remember.

  “I just wanted to go home. I just wanted to go home to Mom and Heather. William told me that Mom gave me to him to keep, that I belonged to him forever, but I didn’t believe him and I just wanted to go home.”

  She wept then, wept like she never had before, wept like she would never stop, bent over her knees with her arms over her head and the musty smell of the Box inside her nose and the feeling of this stranger’s eyes on her, helpless to stem the flood tide of her grief.

  After a long while she felt dried up and exhausted, and she sat up. C.P. looked away from her, like he was embarrassed to have seen her outburst.

  “Let’s cover this up,” he said. “Nobody needs to see this.”

  He closed the trapdoor to the Box and pushed the rug back over it while Mattie watched him, drained and dazed.

  “We’re leaving,” he said. “We’re getting off this goddamn mountain and never coming back. Come on, pull yourself together. We have to pack up some stuff and figure out how to get Jen out of here. I’m going out to see if that sled you talked about is somewhere around.”

  He stood, and held out his hand for Mattie to grasp. She hesitated, because there was a part of her that was still saying William will be angry you’re not supposed to talk to strange men but she pushed that part of her down, down, down and away. That person didn’t exist anymore, that little mouse Martha. But she wasn’t quite Samantha yet, either. She was something in between.

  She took C.P.’s hand, and stood on her own two feet.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Mattie went to check on Jen while C.P. was outside. Jen was still asleep, breathing lightly, but she didn’t rouse at all when Mattie touched her forehead or shook her shoulder. There was certainly something more seriously wrong with Jen than just the wound from the trap, but Mattie was at a loss. She didn’t have any real medical knowledge. If anything she was the one who’d needed medical care over the years, particularly after the losses of her children. William had always taken care of her then.

  She went to the closet and took out her trousers and a heavy sweater and changed into them. At least she wouldn’t slow everyone down by trying to walk in skirts and petticoats. Her hair was falling out of its braid—it had been more than a day since she’d combed and bound it—and it was in her way as she dressed.

  She didn’t have time to brush it all out—that was a very long task, one that required assistance. William usually brushed her hair for her. It was the only time he was anything like tender with her. He liked to sit by the fire with her sitting in front of him, and he would carefully brush the waist-length strands until they gleamed, and call her his little Rapunzel, his princess in a tower.

  She felt a deep and sudden revulsion. William had liked her hair this way. William wanted her to have it long, long, long and never cut it because she was his doll to do with as he pleased, a doll he could play with if he wanted or break if he wanted, a doll that only moved and talked at his whim.

  Mattie rushed out of the bedroom and to her worktable. There was a very sharp knife there that she used for slicing carrots and potatoes and deer meat, and she wondered that he let her have such a sharp object within reach. He must not have been afraid that she would try to kill him with it.

  There were so many times she could have. He slept so heavily at night. She could have slit his throat and he wouldn’t have been able to do a thing about it. He might have slept through the whole thing.

  Why didn’t I? Why?

  (Because he made you think you couldn’t. He made you think that you belonged to him.)

  She picked up the knife, pulled her braid taut with her other hand, and sawed through the hair close to her nape.

  The knife cut through the thick braid easily, and a moment later she held the long messy rope that used to be her hair. The braid had blood in it, and she felt the cut on her head where William had hit her with the shovel. It was clotted over now.

  She swung her head from side to side. Her head felt so light. It almost didn’t feel like her own head. She looked at the braid and a thought came, unbidden and unwanted.

  William will be so angry when he sees.

  No. She needed to stop worrying about William, what William wanted or didn’t want, how William would feel about things. William didn’t matter anymore.

  C.P. opened the cabin door and stood on the porch for a moment, stamping the snow off his boots. Cold air swirled around her feet and she noticed then that she hadn’t put any socks on.

  “That sled is a little on the small side—Jen’s pretty tall—but I think we can figure something out. It’s wide so maybe we can lay her on her side and tuck her up so her head and legs don’t hang off.”

  He shut the door, looked at her properly for the first time, and did an exaggerated double take.

  “Time for a new look?”

  She dropped the knife on the table, let the braid fall to her feet.

  “William liked my hair long.”

  “Ah,” he said. “I bet it got in your way.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  She felt like new, like an animal shedding its winter coat, fresh and ready for spring. She felt less like Mattie and more like Samantha.

  “I found something out in the snow,” he said, reaching into his pocket and pulling something out, something that jingled. He held it out to her. “Do these belong to that guy?”

  “William’s keys,” she said, her heart leaping. “He always keeps them on him, or near him.”

  “They must have fallen out of his pocket last night. Maybe when he was chasing us. The thing is, there’s a vehicle key on here. He’s got a truck or a jeep or maybe an ATV stashed somewhere. You said he goes down to the town and comes back the same day, right? So wherever he had it hidden, it can’t be too far away.”

  “But it has to be far enough that I won’t find it by accident,” Mattie said. “He never lets me go very far from the cabin by myself, but he’s very cautious. I’m sure it’s at least an hour’s walk, maybe more.”

  “Still, an hour’s walk, or even two—that’s nothing. If we can find it then we’re saved. We can load Jen up and just drive down the mountain. I wonder if there’s an access road somewhere that he’s using. We didn’t see one when we were coming up, but then we followed marked trails from a parking area, and the marked trails pretty much stay away from this part of the mountain. Griffin only drifted in this direction by accident, and then he found the caves, and he was so excited . . .”

  C.P. trailed off, and Mattie knew he was thinking about Griffin hanging from the tree, not so far from them. But she was thinking about something else, something she’d wanted to know about for a long time.

  “May I have those keys, please?”

  “Sure, they technically belong to you, I guess.”

  Mattie took the keys and went into the bedroom. C.P. followed her like a duckling. He did that, she’d noticed. Just sort of trailed along in her wake, almost like he hoped she wouldn’t see him there.

  She knelt before the trunk, staring at the batch of keys.

  “It’s probably that one,” he said, reaching over her shoulder to
tap at the smallest key. “The other ones look too big.”

  Mattie lifted the key to the lock, hands trembling. She’d been told so many times not to try to enter the bedroom when William opened the trunk. She was to never, ever look inside.

  The lock clicked. She opened the trunk.

  “Whoa,” C.P. said.

  Mattie didn’t understand what she was looking at, and felt a little disappointed. There was a jumble of small packets filled with brown stuff on the top layer of the trunk.

  “That’s heroin,” C.P. said. He sounded excited and scared at the same time. “That guy is a heroin dealer. That’s how he has all that money.”

  “Heroin?”

  “It’s a drug, an illegal drug. But jeez, where is he getting it? He’s not making it, not up here. I wonder if some big cartel does a drop from a plane, maybe, or brings it up on snowmobiles and then he takes the stuff into town and distributes it to dealers who take it elsewhere. Because that is a lot of shit, right there. Way more than he could sell in town, unless everyone in town is an addict. Although I guess it is possible, because there is a meth crisis and everything. There are some towns where like 90 percent of the population is addicted to meth.”

  Mattie didn’t understand most of this. She sort of understood the concept of illegal drugs, because she remembered posters at school admonishing the students—“DON’T DO DRUGS”—but she’d been far too young to know what drugs really were, or what they did to people.

  She remembered then that there were days when she heard a noise like an engine, coming near to the cabin, and whenever this happened she wasn’t allowed to go outside for anything, not even to use the outhouse. But William would go out carrying his rucksack, and when he returned he would go into the bedroom and shut the door.

  “William sells this?” she said. “And that’s how he gets all of his money?”

  “Yeah,” C.P. said. “Move it around and see how much of it is in there. No, wait. Put on some gloves before you do that.”

  “Why?”

  “Because when the cops come to arrest him, you don’t want that guy to say you were his accomplice. You don’t want your fingerprints on the packets. He might try to implicate you, even though you were his victim and everything.”