Candace stared at Ruthie. “When’s your birthday?” she asked.
“October thirteenth.”
Fawn tugged on Ruthie’s hand, guiding it down to her doll, who was resting on Fawn’s legs, still all bundled in a thick blanket. Fawn pushed Ruthie’s hand against the doll. There was something hard there, under the blankets.
“And how old are you?” Candace asked.
“Nineteen.” Ruthie pulled back the blankets slightly, gingerly feeling the outline of the object. She put all her energy into keeping her face blank.
The gun.
Fawn had gotten the gun from its hiding place in their mom’s room and wrapped it in the blanket. Ruthie carefully pushed the blanket back into place.
“You’re the spitting image of your mother, did you know that?”
Candace said to Ruthie.
Fawn laughed and shook her head incredulously. “Ruthie doesn’t look anything like Mama.”
“That’s because Alice Washburne is not her mother.” Candace let her words drop like bombs, watching their faces as the dust settled.
“The O’Rourkes are my real parents,” Ruthie said quietly. It wasn’t a question. Her hand was resting on the blanket-covered gun.
She’d known the truth since she first saw the photo at Candace’s, hadn’t she? Felt it deep down.
It was funny, though—when she was a little kid, she used to have fantasies about Mom and Dad not being her real parents; she’d imagine a rich couple, a king and queen of some far-off country she’d never heard of, coming to claim her as their own and ferry her off into the life she was meant to be leading, a life that didn’t involve cleaning out the chicken coop and wearing hand-me-down clothes. But now that she had finally gotten her wish, it didn’t feel like a magical new beginning. It felt like a punch in the gut, hard and heavy.
“Like I said, you’re a smart girl.”
Fawn clutched Ruthie’s hand tighter.
“Which makes you … my aunt?” Ruthie wasn’t sure what else to say. Pleased to meet you, actual blood relative—that didn’t seem appropriate.
“I don’t get it,” Fawn whispered, looking from Ruthie to Candace.
“It’s confusing, isn’t it?” Candace said, giving Fawn a sympathetic look. “To explain, we’d have to go way back, to when Tommy and I were kids. We lived here, in this house. After Sara Harrison Shea died, the house was left to her niece, Amelia Larkin. It stayed in the family. Tommy and I are the great-great-grandchildren of Amelia.”
Ruthie took this in. She was a blood relative of Sara Harrison Shea. Whether Sara had been a madwoman or a mystic, there was a piece of her inside Ruthie.
“When we were kids, we found hiding places all over the house—the one in the hall closet, one in our parents’ bedroom floor, several here and there behind the walls, and one in the back of one of the kitchen cabinets, right over there,” she said, pointing at the cabinet that held the mugs and glasses. “That’s where we found the missing pages from Sara Harrison Shea’s diary, including instructions for how to make a sleeper walk again. She’d copied them from the letter Auntie had left for her.”
“What’s a sleeper?” Fawn asked.
Candace’s eyes grew big and wolfish. “A dead person brought back to life.”
Fawn bit her lip. “But that’s not real, right?” She looked at Ruthie.
“Of course not,” Ruthie said, but Fawn looked frightened, unconvinced.
“Like aliens?” Fawn asked.
“Yeah, like aliens,” Ruthie said, smiling what she hoped was a reassuring smile at Fawn. She turned to Candace. “So you had these missing pages all this time?”
Candace held up her hand. “Not so fast. Let me finish. We had the directions, but there was still a part missing,” she explained. “There was a map telling where to go to do the spell, and we couldn’t find it anywhere. Our parents had cleared so much out of the house, hauling off box after box to junk shops, wanting to rid themselves of everything associated with crazy Sara. So Tommy and I knew how to do it, but not where to do it. Sara’s papers said there was a portal somewhere close to the house, perhaps even in the house, and that, for the spell to work, you had to go to the portal. But without the map or a description, we were out of luck.”
“So what did you do with the pages you’d found?” Ruthie asked.
“We hid them away. Then, when we were adults, Tommy took charge of them. He promised they were worth a great deal of money, even without the map, and once he found a buyer, we would split the profits. He had a friend he’d met in college who dealt in antiquarian books and papers.…”
“Our father!” Ruthie said.
“Yes. James Washburne. Tom and Bridget arranged to meet James and his wife, Alice, here at the house one weekend, sixteen years ago. They were going to show them the diary pages and try one more time to find the portal. Then the pages would go up for auction, and we’d all be rich, according to Tommy.”
“So what happened?” Ruthie asked.
Candace shook her head, pursed her lips tight. “Tommy and Bridget were killed.”
“Killed?” Ruthie gasped. In just a few short minutes, she’d been given new parents, then had them taken away again. “How?”
“Alice and James claimed there was something in the woods that got them—a monster of some sort that dragged their bodies off.”
Fawn’s whole body went rigid.
“There’s no such thing as monsters,” Ruthie said, taking her little sister’s hand firmly in hers and giving it a squeeze.
“I agree completely,” Candace said. “In the beginning, I was in such a state of shock that I accepted their story. I wasn’t exactly convinced that there was a monster, but I thought maybe there had been a terrible accident. But over the years, I’ve come to see the truth. I can’t believe how stupid, how naïve, I was.”
“The truth?” Ruthie said.
Candace nodded. “Isn’t it obvious? James and Alice murdered my brother and his wife to get the pages. They knew what they were worth and wanted them all for themselves.”
Ruthie shook her head vigorously. “My parents aren’t killers!” This idea was more absurd to her than the idea of a monster out in the woods.
“Think about it, Ruthie. Couldn’t anyone become a killer if the stakes were high enough?” She was silent for several seconds. “If you want proof, you don’t have to look far. Here I am, threatening two young girls, one of whom is my long-lost niece, with a gun, so that I can find those damn missing pages.”
“What do you want them so badly for?” Ruthie asked. “You don’t actually believe they work, do you?”
Candace laughed. “No. But there are plenty of other people out there who do believe. People willing to pay a great deal of money. Money that I, in turn, will pay the fanciest lawyer I can find to get my son back.”
Ruthie nodded. It made sense now and worried Ruthie—Candace was clearly an unstable woman with nothing left to lose and everything to gain. “So you really think my mother has these missing diary pages?”
“Yes, I believe so, though your parents always claimed the pages were lost the weekend that Tommy and Bridget were killed. But I’ve been waiting patiently over the years, sure the pages would surface one day—that your parents would try to sell them. Which is what I think might be happening now. I think that maybe, for some reason, your mother has finally decided the time is right. Maybe she’s already sold them. It’s possible she took the money and ran.”
Fawn shook her head. “She wouldn’t leave us.”
“Fawn’s right,” Ruthie said. “She wouldn’t. I can believe that if she did have the pages she might try to sell them, but I think if she was doing it, she’d be doing it for us.” Ruthie thought of her mother’s promise to help with college next year—was this her big plan, to take the one thing of value she had and sell it so Ruthie could go to the school of her choice?
“Maybe you’re right.” Candace shrugged. “Or maybe your mother tried to sell them and s
omething went wrong. I must admit that, when you showed up at my house and told me she’d disappeared, I was … surprised,” Candace said, plucking at a strand of her hair. “Alice was very committed to staying here, to raising you as her own child. Both of your parents were. I promised them I’d stay away, would let them raise you, and would never tell you about your real parents. We all decided that was what was best. There was nowhere else for you to go. My husband—my ex-husband—he didn’t want an extra mouth to feed, and he just wanted it all to go away. He never … approved of how close I was with Tommy, I see that now. And James and Alice wanted to stay on here, to watch over the hill and make sure whatever creature it was they believed lived there wouldn’t harm anyone again. They were … caught up in the mythology of it all. In Sara and the sleepers. They felt like they’d been led here—like they were part of something bigger than themselves.”
Ruthie thought of all the warnings her parents had given her over the years: Stay out of the woods. It’s dangerous up there.
Was there something up there in those woods?
She remembered the uneasy feeling of being watched she so often had out there; finding her father dead with the ax clenched in his hands; being carried down the hill when she was a little girl, told it was all a bad dream.
Her thoughts were interrupted by a crashing sound from somewhere in the back of the house. Candace pulled out her gun and jumped up so fast she nearly knocked the table over.
“Where’d it come from?” Candace asked, eyes huge and frightened. She held the gun in both hands, pointing up toward the ceiling.
“The bathroom, I think,” Ruthie answered.
Candace started to leave the kitchen, then turned back and looked at the girls, who were still in their seats. “Come on,” she insisted. “We stay together.”
They raced to the bathroom and found the window broken, glass and melting snow covering the tile floor. There were drops of blood splattered here and there. Fawn grabbed Ruthie’s hand, held it in a bone-crushing grip, her own small hand hot and surprisingly strong. Her other arm was wrapped tightly around Mimi—still swaddled in the blanket, gun tucked inside.
“Stay behind me,” Candace hissed. Slowly, she followed the puddles and drips of blood down the hall and into the living room. Ruthie kept Fawn behind her, listening hard for sounds, but only hearing her own heart pounding. As irrational as it was, one thought kept bubbling its way to the top of her frazzled brain: It’s the monster. The monster is real, and it’s here, in the house.
“Hold it right there,” Candace said, raising her gun.
A woman stood, bent over the coffee table, holding in her hands the Nikon the girls had found in the backpack earlier. She was tall, thin, and very pale, dressed in paint-splattered jeans and an expensive-looking coat. Blood leaked from the thin black glove on her right hand.
“Where did you get this?” she asked, holding out the camera. Her voice was cracked and broken, and her eyes were full of tears. “Where did you get this?”
Katherine
“Put the camera down,” the blond woman said, her gun aimed right at Katherine. The two girls stood behind her, looking just as frightened as they had when she’d seen them through the window with the woman who was holding the gun.
As soon as she spotted the familiar bag and contents on the coffee table, she’d forgotten everything else—the gun, the girls in danger she was supposed to be saving.
“Is this someone you know?” the blond woman asked the girls.
“No!” said the older girl. “I’ve never seen her before.”
“Maybe she’s a sleeper,” the smaller girl said, clutching a beat-up rag doll tight.
What was Katherine supposed to say? How could she begin to explain her presence here?
But no. They were the ones with the explaining to do. They had Gary’s backpack.
Ask them, Gary whispered in her ear. Ask them how they got it.
She clenched the Nikon tighter and waved it in front of them. “This was my husband’s. This is all his.”
“Put the camera down and step away from the bag,” ordered the blond woman, gesturing with her gun. “I’m not going to tell you again.”
“My husband’s name was Gary,” Katherine said to the girls as she set the camera back down on the coffee table, her voice cracking and desperate. “Did you know him? Did he come to your house, maybe?” Both girls shook their heads.
“He’s dead,” Katherine said, voice shaking. “He was here, in West Hall. Then, on his way home, there was an accident, the roads were icy and …” She was unable to go on, her thoughts jumbled, the pain and loss fresh and raw all over again as she looked down at Gary’s things.
“I’m sorry,” the older girl said.
The woman with the gun looked over at the older girl. “What’s the story with the camera stuff, Ruthie?”
“Seriously, I don’t know,” she said. “We just found it.”
“Found it?” Katherine asked.
The woman with the gun made a tsk-tsk sound, tongue against teeth, and shook her head. “These girls seem to have a talent for finding stuff that used to be owned by the dead and the missing,” she said. “So where’d you find the bag, girls—was it in the hall closet? Where you just told me there was nothing but the wallets?”
Ruthie shook her head. “It was in my mom’s closet. Upstairs. We just found it tonight. I don’t know why my mom had it. I tried turning the camera on, but couldn’t make it work.”
Katherine nodded. “The battery’s probably dead.”
“Will it still have photos stored?” the blond woman asked. “Could we put new batteries in it to check?”
“We can plug in the charger, get it going, and take a look,” Katherine said. “If no one’s erased them, it should have the last photos he took on it.”
The last photos Gary took. Katherine’s hands were trembling.
The woman nodded. “Let’s do that. I think we’re all a little curious.” She kept the gun pointed at Katherine. “I’ll take the bag and camera into the kitchen, and we’ll get the battery charging. While we’re waiting, you can tell us just who you are and how the hell you figured out your dead husband’s camera stuff would be in this house.”
“I’m not sure where to start,” Katherine confessed once they were all at the table. The blond woman had ordered the older girl to get them coffee and now sat with her gun pointed at Katherine. It was all very bizarre, being held at gunpoint while coffee was being served—“Cream or sugar?” the teenaged girl asked politely. It felt like she’d stepped into a scene from some art house film, the kind she and Gary might have gone to see back in college.
“At the beginning,” the woman ordered.
“Okay,” Katherine said, taking in a breath and trying not to think about the gun pointed at her chest. She began by telling how Gary was killed in a car accident, how she got the last credit-card bill, how that led her to West Hall.
“So you really moved to West Hall just because that was the last place Gary visited?” the older girl—Ruthie—asked, disbelieving. “I mean, no one ever moves to West Hall. Not willingly.”
“Don’t interrupt her,” the blond woman said, then gestured at Katherine with the gun. “Go on,” she ordered. “And don’t leave anything out. You never know what might be important.”
Katherine told them about finding Visitors from the Other Side hidden away in Gary’s toolbox, and Lou Lou’s telling her about Gary’s lunch with the egg lady.
“Egg lady?” Now it was the little girl who spoke, her eyes two huge brown saucers. “You mean our mom?”
So she’d been right! These were the daughters of the egg lady. But where was she? And what was her connection to Gary?
“I guess so. Lou Lou didn’t know anything about her—just that she sold eggs every Saturday at the farmers’ market. I went today looking for her, but she wasn’t there. Then I found pictures of your house in a book I picked up at the bookstore.”
“That
Historical Society book? Oh God, Mom was so pissed that our picture was in there,” Ruthie said. “She tried to get them to take it out, but they’d already printed hundreds of copies.”
Katherine went on. “When I saw that picture of you three in the garden, I wondered if the gray-haired lady could possibly be the egg lady I’ve been looking for, so I decided to take a ride out. I parked by the road and came in on foot to get closer. I saw you holding a gun on these girls,” she said, eyeing the woman with the gun, “and knew I had to act.”
The woman laughed. “You did one hell of a job, lady,” she said.
The girls stared at her, wide-eyed. Katherine was sure she saw a trace of disappointment there. You? You were our last chance! And look what happened.
“But why would this lady’s photographer husband be meeting Mom at Lou Lou’s?” asked Ruthie. She rubbed her eyes, which had dark circles beneath them. “And why does Mom have his bag? It doesn’t make any sense.”
“He had his backpack with him when he left the house the day he was killed,” Katherine told them. “It wasn’t in the car after the crash. I asked the police and paramedics, but no one remembered seeing it.”
There was silence. They all looked down into their cups of untouched coffee. The little girl clutched her bundled doll tight against her chest.
“So the camera will have a record of the last pictures taken?” the woman with the gun asked.
“Yes,” Katherine explained. “They’ll be stored there. Unless someone wiped it clean.”
“Well, let’s turn on the camera and check it out,” the woman said.
“What is it you think might be on the camera?” Katherine asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe a clue about where Alice Washburne has gone and what she’s done with the pages.”
“Pages?”
“Candace here thinks my mother has some of the missing diary pages of Sara Harrison Shea,” Ruthie said. “The written instructions for how to bring the dead back to life.”
Katherine replaced the charged batteries and turned the camera on. The others gathered around as she navigated the menu and pulled up photos onto the camera’s display screen.
The Winter People Page 19