Near the Bone(35)

Asleep in front of the fire. William picked me up and carried me into the bed.

She grabbed the money and hurried over to the couch, kneeling down in front of it. There was a space of about two or three inches between the bottom of the couch and the floor. Mattie stuck her arm into that space up to her elbow. She felt the thick grime of dust there (I never clean underneath here, William would be so angry if he knew) and carefully placed the roll of bills about halfway under.

When she pulled her arm out it was covered in dust. Some of the dust emerged in balls, little tumbleweeds rolling, leaving evidence of her crime.

What if he sees?

“Stay calm, don’t panic. All you have to do is sweep it away and he’ll never know.”

She heard William whistling as he entered the clearing.

Mattie dashed to the broom, grabbed it, ran back to the dust on the floor, swept it into the dustpan and dumped the dustpan right into the washtub. Normally she would empty the dust outside but that was impossible with William nearly at the door. The whistling was right up to the porch.

She leaned the broom in its corner as he stomped across the porch. He kicked his boots against the doorframe to loosen the snow from the treads. She darted back to the washtub, submerging both arms in the water just as William opened the door. When he glanced at her, she was energetically scrubbing his pants along the washboard.

“It’s all set, Mattie my girl,” he said, stepping out of his boots and closing the door. “If that monster approaches from the river, he’ll regret it.”

“What if it doesn’t?” she asked.

Her voice was a little breathless, but she was washing the clothes so vigorously that surely he would only attribute it to work. Sweat trickled between her shoulder blades.

Stay calm, stay calm. If you act like something’s wrong, he’ll know something’s wrong.

“Oh, I’ve got plans for that demon,” William said. “Don’t you worry. If it doesn’t take the trap then I’ve got other ways of making it pay.”

Mattie thought then of Griffin and C.P. and their friend Jen, the one they were going to meet. What if they were still on the mountain? What if one of them got stuck in William’s monster trap?

You told them to leave. You warned them. If they don’t go, it’s not your responsibility.

It wasn’t her responsibility but she worried just the same. They were foolish, those boys—for that was what they were, for all that they looked like men. Tromping around in the woods looking for made-up creatures? They were like children searching for unicorns or fairies.

You have to make the house just right or the fairy won’t come live in it.

Heather’s voice. Heather’s hands, carefully arranging tiny pieces of twig and rock and leaf, building fairy houses in the backyard.

But how will we know if the fairy came to live here?

Her own voice—no, Samantha’s—tiny, childish, full of doubt.

The fairies will leave something for us—an acorn or something like that, so that we’ll know they used the house and want to say thank you.

And the next morning they’d gone out—still wearing their pajamas—and ran in their bare feet over the damp grass to the edge of their lawn. The lawn went right up to the woods—they didn’t have a fence, like some other people did—and they had been careful to build the fairy houses in the grass because Mom didn’t let them go into the woods alone.

Mattie remembered flattening herself against the grass—the morning damp seeping through her favorite My Little Pony pajamas—and peering inside the fairy house.

“There’s something here! Heather, look!”

Her own hand reached carefully inside to pull out a tiny, perfect pinecone.

Of course, no fairies had come. Mattie knew that now. Her mother must have gone out to the yard in the night and put the pinecone inside so that her girls could hold on to their belief a little longer, so that their world would stay dusted with magic.

Griffin and C.P.—they were like Samantha and Heather when they were small, still believing in the possibility of something, hoping for it with all their hearts.

But they think they’re going to find some benign creature, something that will wave at them while they take photos and sketches. They don’t know there’s a real monster out there.

William had been walking around the cabin stuffing objects into his pack while Mattie drifted away in her mind. She was lucky he was so preoccupied with the creature in the woods, else she surely would have been punished for woolgathering.

She squeezed the water out of William’s trousers and pinned them to the line, trying very hard not to think about the roll of money that had been in the pocket. If she thought about it, she might look at the place where she’d hidden it, and if she looked then William might wonder what she was looking at.

Keep calm, keep safe. Hide in plain sight.

Mattie noticed William stuffing some of the grenades into the backpack.

“William,” she said, very carefully, very respectfully. “If you detonate those bombs, won’t people hear and come investigate?”

“Don’t worry,” he said. “The only place I’m going to use them is up in that cave.”

That got Mattie worrying about a cave-in, or a landslide. It didn’t seem like a good idea to set off a grenade in the side of a mountain.