Near the Bone(78)

“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.”

“Fingerprints,” she said. “Right.”

She still didn’t really understand, but she went to the closet and took out a pair of mittens.

“Don’t you have anything with fingers?” he asked as he watched her pull them on.

“No, I only know how to knit mittens,” she said. “Do you have gloves?”

“Not exactly,” he said, and took his out of his pocket and put them on. They looked like mittens at first, and then he unbuttoned a button at the top of the palm and they were half-gloves underneath, leaving the tops of his fingers bare. “Not very good for hiding your fingerprints, although they are useful when you need more mobility with your hands than you can get from a mitten.”

Mattie knelt in front of the trunk again and swept some of the packets to the side. Underneath there were several stacks of wrapped bills and a pile of newspaper clippings.