The Winter People(71)

She shook her head.

“Tell me the truth,” I begged her. “Tell me what really happened. How did you end up in that well?” My fingers ached to touch her, to get lost in her golden hair (was it shorter?). But somehow I knew I mustn’t. And perhaps (I’ll admit it now, to myself) I was a little afraid.

She turned to me, and in the darkness I could see the flash of a toothy smile.

She rose and went to the window, put her two pale hands against the frosty pane of glass.

I stood up and moved to the window beside her, squinted out into the darkness. There was a crescent moon rising. Martin was coming out of the barn with a shovel in his hand. He glanced up at the house, and I ducked like a child playing hide-and-seek. He must not have seen me, because he kept walking, crossing the yard.

I knew just where he was going.

I turned to Gertie, to ask her what I was supposed to do next, but she was gone. I looked back to the window, and there were the ghostly imprints of her two hands, left behind in the frost.





Martin


January 31, 1908


Sweat gathered between his shoulder blades as the shovel bit into the crusty snow. He had to dig through eighteen inches before even hitting dirt. He worked as quickly as he could, scooping and dumping.

His bad foot ached in the cold. His breath came out in great pale clouds. The snowy yard looked blue in the dim moonlight.

Faster, Martin. You’ve got to do this quickly. You mustn’t hesitate. You mustn’t be a coward.

“I know,” he said out loud.

Behind him, the house watched. Sara slept, dreaming her mad dreams. Over to the left, past the barn, he could see the outline of the hill, the tips of the rocks of the Devil’s Hand, dark specks against the snow.

He looked back down at the wooden cross he himself had built, her name carefully carved across the top:

GERTRUDE SHEA

1900–1908

BELOVED DAUGHTER

His hands shook. They were greasy with fear-sweat, the shovel slipping.

Faster.

The slanted shadows of the slate gravestones beside hers watched, seemed to shift impatiently in the moonlight: her infant brother, grandfather, grandmother (for whom Gertie was named), and uncle, watching, wondering, What are you doing to our little Gertie? She’s one of us now. She doesn’t belong to you.

For days now, Martin had stared out at little Gertie’s grave, knowing what he must do.

He had to find out what was in her pocket.

Sara had been babbling to Lucius, insisting that Gertie was murdered and that there was proof in the pocket of the dress she’d been buried in, talking nonsense about ghosts and spirits. Who else might she tell, given the chance? How long until someone listened to her and realized that, behind the madness, there might be a horrible, hidden truth? Until Sara was accused of murder? He needed to see what, if anything, was in little Gertie’s pocket.

Martin gripped the shovel tighter. The soil was strangely loose and soft under the blanket of snow. The shovel moved through it like a warm knife through butter. It shouldn’t be this easy, but it was.

Two weeks ago, he’d lit a fire to thaw the ground enough to dig a hole. He’d stood all day—a father in mourning—feeding it scraps of wood, cut-up deadfalls from the orchard. Shapes had leapt out of the flames at him, taunting: the well, the fox, Gertie’s hair hanging from a nail. He threw in one branch after another, trying to feed the hungry flames, trying to burn away the pictures he saw there.

The soil over the grave was still dark with ashes and lumps of charcoal.

How deep down was she? Six feet? Seven?

A foot for each year of her life.

He thought of the warning he’d given Sara days ago: Have you thought about the … condition her body will be in?

Oh yes. Martin had thought about it. Dreamed about it. Gertie looking up at him, flesh falling away from bones, little teeth still pearly white, mouth open as she breathed the words Why? Why, Daddy? Why?

“No choice,” Martin said out loud. He redoubled his efforts, digging faster, harder. The pile beside the grave began to grow.

And what was it he hoped to accomplish? If he dug her up, found something of Sara’s in her pocket, what would he do?

Hide it? Protect his wife?

Or would he show it to the sheriff, have Sara locked away for good?

Mad or not, Sara was all he had left.

For weeks now, he’d been going over that day in his mind, trying to remember every detail: the fox, the trail of blood through the snow. Had he heard Gertie call him? Had he heard anything at all? Had there been someone else out there in the woods? There was the old woman, but no—that had only been a tree.

Part of him refused to believe that Sara was capable of hurting Gertie, not even in a spell of madness. Gertie was everything to Sara.

His shovel made a clunking sound as it hit wood: the top of Gertie’s coffin. The coffin that he and Lucius had made from pine boards he’d been saving to build a new chicken coop in the spring.

“What are you doing, Martin?”

Martin spun. Sara was behind him, shouldering his Winchester rifle, aiming for his chest.

She shook her head, clicked her tongue. She was wearing her nightgown, but had pulled on her overcoat and boots.

He froze, shovel in hand. “Sara,” he stammered. “I thought … you’re supposed to be resting.”