Near the Bone(79)

“There must be thousands of dollars,” C.P. said. “If you took this you could buy an island in the middle of the ocean.”

“An island,” Mattie said. She’d never been to an island, although she had a sudden vision of sand and sun and a lone palm tree.

She picked up the pile of newspaper clippings. There was a black-and-white picture of a little girl with light hair and dark eyes smiling awkwardly from the first one, her head tilted just a little too far back so that she appeared off-center.

“That’s you,” he said. “Oh my god. I don’t think you should look at those clippings.”

“Me?” she said, staring at the little girl. “This is me?”

There were no mirrors in William’s cabin. Mattie hadn’t tracked the changes in her face and body as the years passed because it had been years since she’d seen herself. It had been such a long time that she’d forgotten the shape of her eyes and her nose and her mouth and her cheeks.

The little girl in Mattie’s hand wavered, and she realized her hand was shaking.

“Here, give me those. You don’t need to see those,” C.P. said.

“No,” she said, and forced herself to take deep breaths, to make her hand stop shaking. “I know you want to help. But I need to see. I need to know.”

There was a headline above the picture of the awkwardly smiling girl. “TRAGEDY—8-year-old girl missing after mother found brutally murdered.”

She placed the clipping to one side. The next clipping had the same picture of herself, this time below larger text that said: “MISSING—police seek information.”

The third clipping made her breath stop.

The headline read: “MURDER AND KIDNAPPING IN A SMALL TOWN.” And there was the picture of herself again, smiling her awkward smile. But Mattie didn’t care about that picture. Next to it was a candid photo of a woman wearing a checked shirt, her smile a little too wide to be considered pretty, her right hand pushing her hair back from her face.

Her mother.

“Mom,” she said. She felt the tears—they were blocking her throat and pushing against the backs of her eyes. But she didn’t cry. She stroked the picture with her finger, because she had a face now for the person she’d once loved most in the world. “I forgot your face.”

And even though Mattie stared down at her mother, she still couldn’t dredge up a memory of her mom’s face.

“Look, we should, um, stay on track,” C.P. said. “I know this is important to you, and finding this stuff explains a lot, but we really need to get going. There are only so many hours of daylight.”

“I know,” Mattie said, and sighed. She folded up all of the newspaper clippings and put them in her pocket.

“I can’t believe that sicko kept cuttings of his own crime,” C.P. said. “You should take some of that money. I think you earned it.”

Mattie hesitated. Now that she knew how William earned his keep, the money felt wrong, somehow dirty. She didn’t know exactly what heroin was but C.P. said it was a drug and all she remembered from childhood was that drugs were bad, that they ruined lives. Should she take money earned on the back of someone’s ruined life?

He ruined your life, too. And principles won’t feed you.

She took two stacks of bills, which seemed like more money than she would ever need, and then closed the trunk and locked it again. She stood up, holding the keys in one hand and the money in the other. The money felt like it was burning her.

“You get all your cold weather gear on. Do you have a backpack or bag that we can use to carry some of that food in the storehouse?”

“William has a rucksack. He usually keeps it in the storehouse, but I don’t know where. I’ve just seen him carrying it in and out.”

“I’ll go look while you put the rest of your things on. I’m really hoping that we can find whatever vehicle that key goes with,” he said, pointing to the keys. “I think it would be smart to take provisions, though, just in case we don’t find it. Without a car we’ll be spending another night on the mountain for sure. Anyway, don’t lose those keys. It would suck if we did find a car and didn’t have any way to start it.”

Mattie felt very nervous then, felt the sudden burden of not losing their way to escape. She went out in the main room, C.P. trailing her again, and rummaged in her work basket until she came up with a ball of wool. She cut off a long length of it, pulled the key ring over the string, made a second loop through the key ring just in case, then tied the double loop with the keys dangling from it around her neck. She tucked it all inside her sweater.

“OK, that works,” he said. “You won’t drop them by accident, I guess.”

Mattie put on her socks and boots and coat while C.P. went out to the storehouse. She wrapped a long scarf around her throat, pulled a hat over her shorn hair, and carefully tucked the stacks of bills and the money she’d hidden under the couch inside her coat pocket. C.P. returned just as she was putting her mittens in the opposite pocket. He was carrying William’s haversack. He held it out to her.

“Do you think you can carry this? I tried not to overfill it. We’re going to need to get my pack, and maybe Jen’s if we can manage it. The tents are with the packs, and if we have to sleep outside we’re going to want tents. Though I have no idea how we’ll even find the packs again. It’s like we ran through a maze last night in the dark.”