Mercy Snow

by Tiffany Baker

  Afterward they lay together, watching through the tiny hatch of the window as high noon mellowed and the sun sank a few inches lower in the sky, the light easing from yellow to a watery gold. Mercy sat up, clutching the sheet to her breasts. Outside, she could hear the lapping of the lake, and the noise shivered up her spine, filling her with a familiar dread. For months she’d been carrying a passel of burdens, and she realized she was tired of that weight. Nate wrapped a lazy arm around her waist and drew her back down to him. His skin was warm and his breathing easy. Mercy let herself relax against him. His breath tickled her shoulder, a Morse code of stops and starts that gave her chills. He traced a line down her arm with his thumb. “Let’s leave,” he said.

  Mercy gathered the sheets back together and began to sit up. Well, what had she expected? Nate was his mother’s son, after all. He was in a whole different league from her. He came from a world of such plenty that he probably didn’t think twice about throwing out something as simple as an old plastic bag. She should have known he’d be done with her quickly. Just maybe not this soon. She bowed her head so that her hair fell like a curtain between them. “Okay. Will you let me get dressed again in private?”

  Nate scowled, confused, and then spoke in a rush, parting her hair so he could stare straight into her eyes. “No, I mean let’s leave Titan Falls. Together.”

  Mercy caught her breath. Part of her being with Nate had to do with her plan to try to trap him, it was true, but this was even better than she expected. For a moment she could see it, the two of them slid together in the front of the car, the windows rolled down, squealing away from Titan Falls. Then she frowned. It could never happen, of course. She had Hannah to look after and Zeke’s name to clear. She was a Snow, and he was a McAllister. They were paper and rock. One was going to cancel out the other. She turned her cheek. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “I’m dead serious. I’ve been thinking about it. After I graduate, let’s just leave. I’ll be eighteen in a few weeks. I have a car. And I’ll be getting some money then, too.”

  Mercy gawped at him. “But what about college? I thought you were all signed up to go off to some fancy one.”

  Nate’s face grew dark. “Dartmouth. It’s where my father went, and his father before him. I hate it. It’s the last place I want to go.”

  Mercy was silent. Unexpectedly, here was this boy she was starting to love, who treated her so kindly she was able to forget for a moment that she was damaged goods. Her life was already full enough of busted things. The sound of the lake pulled her back to reality so hard it was almost like someone yanking on her hair. “I’m thirsty,” she said, slipping out of Nate’s grasp and winding the sheet around her. “How about I get us some water?”

  The stairs were cold under her bare feet and the kitchen floorboards even chillier. She opened cupboards, looking for a pair of glasses, and then random drawers, curious about the flotsam and jetsam of the McAllisters’ lives. She found the summer silverware, mismatched and dented, and another drawer full of battered spatulas and nicked wooden spoons, and then what she surmised was the junk drawer. Idly she flicked through its contents: matches, random lengths of dirty string, coupons years expired. And then her hand touched something soft. With a little difficulty, Mercy reached back into the overly full drawer and made contact with the object again. She twisted and tugged, pulling the thing out into the light, intent in her curiosity.

  “What are you doing?” Nate padded into the kitchen just as Mercy lifted the scarlet mitten up to her face, gasping as she recognized it. Nate’s voice cracked her back to her senses. “Where did you get that?”

  Mercy indicated the open drawer. “I found it. Right here. It was right here all along.”

  Nate snatched the glove out of her hand, balling it up. “That’s impossible. How did it get there?” His face was pale.

  “I don’t know.” Mercy was shaking a little. Maybe Hannah was right about all the ghosts she was always saying she saw. “I just reached my hand in the drawer, and there it was.”

  “Do you know whose this is?”

  Mercy didn’t take her eyes from his. She remembered the sight of Suzie being brought into the hospital, a single mitten just like this one balanced on her chest. “Yes.”

  Nate put a fist to his forehead, the crushed wool red as any wound. “Fuck. She was wearing these the night of the accident. She left the movie theater in the middle of the movie for a smoke, and when she came back, I noticed she’d lost one. Her mother made them.”

  “With Hazel’s wool.”

  “Yes.”

  Without taking her eyes off the mitten, Mercy sidled over to Nate. She didn’t know what he might do with it, but she knew that without it she might never be able to prove there was another side to the story of the crash. She put a hand to Nate’s cheek, but he wouldn’t look at her. She kissed him and sent her words sliding into his ear, slow and sure, like a drizzle of honey. “Let me prove my brother didn’t do this.”

  Nate closed his eyes and exhaled, retreating into the silent core of himself where Mercy couldn’t reach. He thought about the night of the crash, when Suzie had come bustling back into the theater lobby surprised and irritated to find him there. He thought of the familiar figure he’d seen retreating with his hands stuffed in the pockets of a camel-hair coat. Slowly Nate unfolded his palm and gave the mitten to Mercy. “We better head back to town.”

  She exhaled and tucked the mitten into her pocket. “What should we do?”

  “I don’t know.” It didn’t matter so much to Nate now. By opening up the cabin early, he’d broken the rules of time, bringing the past crashing into the present, mixing up his future with Mercy’s. Mrs. Flyte’s words from the sugar bush echoed in his memory: It can’t last too much longer. Maybe she was right, but not for the reasons she thought, and that didn’t give Nate any comfort either.

  Somehow he’d always thought it would feel better than this to ruin his father.

  Chapter Sixteen

  It was beginning to occur to June that Cal was stone-cold right. She absolutely wasn’t the correct person to go and banish the Snows. After all, a body wouldn’t use a hammer to push a tack into a board or a torch when the flick of a match would do just fine. Likewise she was beginning to figure that she’d been going about the business with the Snows all wrong, but what else could she do? The situation had become untenable. They had to go.

  “I’ll be honest, June,” Abel confessed from behind the mess of his desk. Half-empty coffee cups were stacked on manila files. His hat sat on top of the filing cabinet. If the mill was the beating heart of the town, Abel’s office was its growling belly. “We don’t have much to go on here. We’re still looking high and low for that boy, but unless we find him, there isn’t anything we can do.”

  “What about the little girl?” June couldn’t bring herself to use Hannah’s name these days. When all this was over, she had decided that she would definitely apply for custody of the child. Cal owed her that much, and she owed it to Hannah—a whole chain of obligation and guilt and misplaced responsibility that only June could straighten out, link by link.

  Abel picked up one of the coffee cups, inspected it, and then quickly put it back down. “She’s about as impossible to spot these days as her older brother.”

  When June had finally worked up the nerve to call social services, she’d gotten nowhere with them. She was astonished to hear that they’d made one visit to the Snow property already, which hadn’t yielded any evidence of a child. June had blown her hair out of her face with exasperation. “But she’s registered at the school! I’ve seen her myself. We spent an entire afternoon together. Sometimes she hides right here in the library, in plain sight.”

  Abel shook his head now, pulling June back to the present. “There’s no real proof she really exists. She registered for school but never showed. The kid’s just not in the system, June.”

  June huffed an impatient breath into the office’s stale air. “You know,
I don’t mind the Snows per se. Why, I feel nothing but sorry for that poor child, forced to squat in those kinds of sorry conditions. It’s Cal who really wants them gone.” Cal, who more or less paid the entirety of Abel’s salary, when it came down to it. June let that subtext hang and then leaned forward. “And what about you? Don’t you care about justice? Don’t you want to catch Zeke Snow and make him pay for all the grief and pain he caused when he ran Fergus off the road?”

  Abel’s face grew sorrowful. “I’ve been in the law a long time now, June. Justice doesn’t always come around the way you expect. Sometimes it doesn’t come at all.”

  June stood up. “In that case it sounds like one of us better go looking for it.”

  Abel rose to see her to the door, wishing Hetty were still around to clamp her daughter-in-law firmly back under her wing. She never would have gotten her neck bent out of shape over the likes of the Snows. Hadn’t even done so when it came to the whole matter of Gert, although the less said about that the better, in Abel’s opinion. He helped June into her coat. She wasn’t a born-and-bred mill girl. She might not know that the river had current and depths no man in his right mind would want to rile. He wrapped a hand around her elbow. “Be careful what you get up to. You might not find what you’re expecting.”

  June shook him off. “Oh, I expect I will.”

  And that, thought Abel, watching her walk through the door, was exactly what had him worried.

  June left Abel’s office fuming. She drove to the mill and jammed her car into park, then sat for a moment to cool down her temper. It wouldn’t do to approach Cal in a huff. But really, she steamed, Abel should have known better than to dismiss her efforts. In the entire twenty years of her marriage, June had always prided herself on not being one to pull rank in the small circle of the town, but now Abel had left her no choice.

  “June, what are you doing here?” Cal jumped to his feet as his secretary showed June into his office, quickly hiding the paperwork he’d been reading. More bad news.

  “Hello, darling.” June offered her cheek to be kissed. “What are you working on?”

  Cal loosened his tie. “Just wrestling with some accounts.” An understatement if he’d ever made one.

  June draped herself over the visitor’s chair in front of his desk. It was deliberately hard-backed, she knew, to discourage anyone from getting too comfortable. “I’ve just come from Abel.”

  “Oh?” Cal cocked an eyebrow.

  “Well, he was absolutely no help. I tried to explain that it’s a matter of vital importance to you that the Snows leave town, but he just doesn’t seem to be doing anything.”

  Cal’s jaw grew tight. “I thought we’d agreed to handle this ourselves, June. Why have you gone and gotten Abel all mixed up in it?”

  June gaped at him. “Because he’s the sheriff, Cal. He’s already mixed up in it, what with the manhunt for Zeke and all. He should be doing more.”

  Cal moved so quickly June didn’t see him coming until it was too late. He came around the desk swinging, and whether he meant to strike her or simply intended to scare her by swatting the air near her, she never really knew. His hand nevertheless struck her cheek, leaving a stinging streak of red. She gasped and blinked at him. Cal stood frozen for a moment, staring at his hand with a look of bewildered horror, and then he glanced out the glass-paneled door of his office to check if his secretary had seen. When he spoke, his jaw was tighter than a bobbin, but his eyes were rueful. “I’ve got it handled.”

  “But I thought you wanted—”

  “I said you and I will handle it. We’ll do it today.”

  June put a hand up to her cheek, hoping the rash of the slap would fade before she had to walk out of the mill. The last thing she needed was fifty pairs of eyes trained on that one single mark. Outside, she could see the river, full with the melt from spring, its peaceful surface so deceptive.

  Cal reached out to June and stroked the spot he’d just hit. He looked almost as shocked as she did. “Jesus. I’m sorry. It’s just that everything is coming down on me now. I swear, once everything is sorted out with the mill, you and I will make a fresh start. Maybe we could go to Europe for a few weeks. Wouldn’t you like that? You could poke around in dusty old churches and libraries to your heart’s content. Everything will go back to the way it was.”

  June wasn’t buying it. Time here only flows in one direction, she thought as Cal put his arm around her. Just like the damn river. In Titan Falls there was no such thing as going back. That was the whole point of everything. Cal ought to have known that better than anyone.

  Hazel was hanging the first dyed yarn of the season on her porch railing when June McAllister arrived. The wet loops were dripping in bright streaks. Hazel was working with the color green—a lovely, grassy hue with an undertint of cheery yellow. If ever there was a true color of spring, June thought, Hazel had just captured it. Later, after everything, June mused, maybe she would return to buy some. She slid her sunglasses off. “Is Nate in the barn?”

  Hazel shook her head. “I let him go early. It’s such a beautiful day, and I figured maybe he wanted to go spend it with some friends. Won’t be too long now before he’s off to college, will it?”

  Maybe it was the change of season, or maybe it was the old scarf she’d tied in a loop around her hair or the swinging of her dyeing smock, but Hazel looked younger than her years to June, almost girlish. Her hands were stained the same green as the wool. June wondered how long it took for the dye to wear off and why Hazel didn’t wear gloves. Maybe she liked being physically marked by the labor, June figured. Maybe she needed proof that she still had some weight in the world. June could understand that. There were days when she, too, felt like she was swimming around in thin air.

  June put on a pout of disappointment. “Oh. I was hoping to catch him.” In truth, she was glad Nate wasn’t here. It would make Cal’s plan run so much smoother. Already he was out in the grazing meadow, she knew, inching toward the sheep.

  “Just keep Hazel talking,” Cal had told her on the drive out to Hazel’s. “If you have to, find a reason to go lure Nate away from the sheep. Let me do everything else.” At the mill he’d changed into old work clothes and a pair of heavy gloves, then shoved a battered cap on his head, but to no avail. He still looked exactly like himself. Then he’d gone to borrow a truck.

  June slid her sunglasses back on her nose now. Her cheekbone was still tender from where Cal had lashed out at her. She winced when the plastic frames brushed the spot. Hazel squinted at her. “How’d you get that bruise on your cheek?”

  “Oh, it’s silly.” June fluttered a hand up to her face.

  Hazel turned back to her wool. Please just shut up about it, June prayed, but Hazel was never one to take other people’s suggestions, especially not subliminal ones. “His father had a mean streak, too. You never knew him well, of course, but I saw what he was like back in the day. The whole town did. Especially Gert Snow.”

  Suddenly the bruise on June’s face didn’t hurt anymore. Her whole body had gone cold. “What do you mean?”

  Hazel fiddled with the green wool. Green for go, June thought. “The Snows and the McAllisters have… a history. But surely you know.”

  The flash of an initialed cuff link tied up tight on a piece of yarn and hung around Hannah’s neck winked in June’s memory. Men didn’t just lose cuff links. They removed them. There was really only one reason Hannah would have found that particular item out in the old smokehouse. Henry must have left it there.

  Just how well had Hazel known Henry McAllister, June suddenly wondered, and wasn’t it odd that Hazel’s husband, of all the men in town, should be the only one never to have set foot in the mill? It was downright peculiar that a woman who kept herself so apart for all these years would turn out to be such a font of local knowledge.

  Hazel smiled, but the gesture wasn’t a bridge of friendliness, a reaching-out from one soul to another. It was more of a bludgeon. June took a surprised s
tep away, a stumble quite out of character for her. She’s not even a little afraid of me, June realized as Hazel looked her in the eye and spoke as if she knew the secret of a lifetime.

  “No one else would say this to your face, my dear, but you are in far, far over your pretty little head. Go ask your husband who Gert Snow was to his father, but don’t blame me if you don’t like the answer. Now, get the hell off my porch.”

  Sheep were so stupid, June thought as she skirted the edge of the sugar bush, looking for Cal. And she wasn’t much better, it seemed. All this time she’d thought she could keep the McAllister secrets as boxed and neatly categorized as her Christmas ornaments, but that was pure folly. She had the terrible feeling that her life was snarling into an unholy mess, knotting its way into fearsome and unexpected shapes she would have no hope of ever untangling.

  In the meadow out in front of her, Hazel’s flock was grazing. Unlike the prehistoric, tropical creatures June had grown up around—alligators and sharks, snakes and terrapins—sheep were herd animals to a fault. If one of the members bolted, the others would do the same, bleating as if already caught. On the other hand, gain one beast’s interest and you’d soon have them all eating out of the palm of your hand, just as her roommates in college were always trying to do with men. She pictured the party where she’d met Cal, her in a plaid old maid’s skirt, him telling a joke to a group of doll-like blond girls with ruby lips and dollar signs in their eyes. He’d been drawn to her because she was different, because she was nothing like those brash, glittering specimens, but what he didn’t know—what she’d never told him—was that she’d wanted to be exactly the same as them.

  From her place in the trees, June watched as the man she’d married, borne a child with, and was starting to grow old with pulled an apple chunk from his pocket and held his palm flat until one of the ewes approached and snuffled at the fruit. The rest of the sheep bleated and crowded closer.