The Winter People(60)

Candace forced a smile, though it was clear her patience was wearing thin. “Sorry to hear that, kiddo. But from now on, you stick with us, okay?”

“I promise,” she said, smiling real big. Fawn’s smile could melt an iceberg. You just couldn’t help smiling back, no matter how mad you were.

Candace rubbed her face, and let her shoulders slump. “Do you have any coffee?”

“Coffee?” Ruthie said. The woman was holding them hostage, and now she wanted refreshments? “Um, sure. I can go put a pot on.” This might be her chance—if she could just get into the kitchen alone for a minute, she could call for help, grab a knife … something.

“We’ll come with you,” Candace said, following close behind. “I don’t want to lose anyone else tonight.”

Candace sat down at the table and watched Ruthie measure and grind the coffee and start the machine. Fawn settled in at her usual place, the chair across from the window, Mimi on her lap.

Ruthie joined the others at the table, sitting beside Fawn. Fawn took Ruthie’s hand and held it tight in her own. Fawn’s hand was hot. She probably needed Tylenol again.

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.”