The Winter People(51)
Martin stepped into the clearing. He had a funny worried look in his eyes. He was carrying his rifle. “Gertie’s gone, Sara. You simply must accept that.” He moved toward me slowly, like I was an animal he was afraid of startling.
“Did you follow me?” I asked, unable to keep the venom from my voice. How dare he?
“I’m worried about you, Sara. You have not been well. You’re not … yourself.”
I laughed. “Not myself?” I tried to recall the Sara I’d been weeks ago, when Gertie was alive. It was true, I had become a different person. The world had shifted. My eyes were open now.
“Let’s go back home, get you into bed. I’ll get Lucius to come this evening to take a look at you.”
He put his arm around me, and I flinched. I flinched at my own husband’s touch. He gripped tightly and led me, as if I were an uncooperative horse.
We said nothing as we walked past the Devil’s Hand, climbed back down the hill, through the trees and orchard, across the field, and back home. He led me upstairs, to our bedroom.
“I know you haven’t been sleeping well at night. A nice rest will do you good,” Martin said, his hand clamped tight around my arm. “Perhaps your trip into town for lunch with Amelia was too much for you.”
As we entered the bedroom, we saw it.
Martin froze, his fingers digging into my arm. I gasped, childish and fearful.
The closet door stood open. There were piles of clothing strewn all around the room, as if a great storm had passed through. A closer look showed that it was all Martin’s clothing. And it had been torn apart, each garment sliced and ruined. Martin’s eyes were huge, furious, and disbelieving. I watched as he leaned down to pick up the sleeve of his good white Sunday shirt, clutching it so hard his hand trembled.
“Why would you do this, Sara?”
And I saw what I had become to him: a madwoman, capable of furious destruction.
“It wasn’t me,” I cried. My eyes searched the closet, finding it empty.
I turned toward the bed, thinking to look under it. There, amid the remains of Martin’s ruined overalls, was a note written in childish scrawl:
Ask Him What He berryed in the field.
I picked up the paper, holding it gently, as if it were a wounded butterfly. Martin snatched it from my hand and read it, his face bone white.
“The ring,” he stammered, looking at me over the top of the paper. “Just like you told me to.”
But there was a little twitch I’d seen before. The same barely recognizable flinch in the muscles around his left eye that he gave after Christmas, when he promised he’d buried the ring back in the field. And here it was again, that little involuntary quiver that told me he was lying.
Katherine
No one knew where the egg lady was.
Katherine walked around the high-school gymnasium several times, but saw no one selling eggs. The wooden floor was covered with rubber mats to protect the surface from wet boots. The gym was horribly crowded, the sound of people talking a deafening buzz in her ears. People in colorful layers jostled her, shouted greetings to one another, hugging and laughing. A whole community connected, and there she was, the stranger in the dark cashmere coat, moving like a shadow among them. She circled the market behind a family—husband, wife, two boys, one of whom looked to be about eight—the age Austin would be if he were alive. The boy begged his father for a cider donut, and his father bought one, then broke it in half, making him share it with his younger brother. The boy scowled beautifully and shoved his half of the donut into his mouth in one glorious bite, letting crumbs dribble down his chin.
Katherine’s eye went to the wall of paintings in the left corner, near the double doors in the back of the gym. They were done in vivid colors and were playful, yet haunting. There was a couple dancing on the roof of a barn while a wolf-faced moon stared down at them. Another showed a man with antlers in a rowboat, gazing longingly at the shore. She turned and continued walking around the gym.
A group of teenagers were gathered in front of the back doors, sharing a bag of maple cotton candy and laughing; they all looked nearly identical in their tall boots and bright ski jackets. She passed a wooden-toy maker, a table from a local apiary selling honey and mead, piles of root vegetables and squash, coolers full of hand-stuffed sausage, a display of sweet rolls and breads, and a table of Unitarian Universalists doing a quilt raffle.
The vendors Katherine talked to didn’t seem to know a thing about the woman with the braid except that she was the egg lady and she knit beautiful warm socks. Katherine stopped to ask a woman in the corner who was spinning wool into chunky brown yarn.
“Oh, you mean Alice? I don’t know where she could be. She’s here every week. Never misses a market.”
“You don’t happen to know her last name, do you?” Katherine asked.
The woman shook her head. “Sorry, I don’t. Brenda Pierce, the market manager, would know, but she’s gone to Florida to be with her dad for open-heart surgery. Check back next week. I’m sure Alice will be here. I’ve never known her to miss a market.”
Alice,” Katherine said, back in her apartment, holding the tiny doll she’d fashioned yesterday from wire and papier-maché.
“I may not have found you, but at least you have a name now.”