The Winter People(75)
Quickly she scooped the rabbit up, surprised by how very light it was. Then she slid Gary’s backpack off her shoulders, carefully laid the animal inside, and zipped it up tight.
She ran to catch up with the others, heart pounding, ears buzzing.
The rabbit was small. It couldn’t be too hard, she imagined, to feel for its ribs, open it up, and remove its heart.
Ruthie
“It’s got to be here somewhere,” Candace said as she scrabbled around at the base of the Devil’s Hand.
“I can’t believe how big the rocks are,” Katherine said, looking up at them. “The tallest one’s got to be twenty feet at least. They don’t look that big in the pictures.”
“The Devil must be a giant,” Fawn said, clinging tight to Mimi. Mimi was still swaddled in the blanket that held the gun.
It had taken them nearly forty-five minutes to climb the hill. Since they’d arrived at the top, Candace had spent at least ten minutes digging randomly with almost spasmodic movements. “The hole could be beneath any of the five rocks,” she said. “They all look the same. What are you all waiting for? Start digging!”
The snow was falling steadily, and the rocks were blanketed in a thick white glove. Candace was pawing through the snow with her mittened hands, pushing and pulling any smaller rocks aside.
“Let me see that,” Ruthie said, tucking the flashlight into her coat pocket and reaching to take the camera from Katherine, who was staring down at the back display. Ruthie saw that Katherine had been studying one of those close-up photos of the instructions for creating sleepers.
Ruthie fast-forwarded to the photo of the opening at the base of the rock. The picture was taken back in October, in daylight, and now it was pitch-dark, and everything was covered with snow. Ruthie studied the grain, shape, and shadows of the rock in the photo, then shone her flashlight on the rocks before her.
Candace was wrong. They weren’t all the same.
“I think it’s the biggest one,” Ruthie said. “The middle finger. See here, the way it seems like it’s kind of leaning to the left compared to the one beside it in the picture? And look at the angle he took it from. He must have been standing right over there, on the left side. There’s the big maple in the background.” She pointed at the tree, now shrouded in snow.
She handed the camera back to Katherine and took off her snowshoes. She used one as a shovel to pull snow back from the base of the middle-finger rock. Soon she’d uncovered a rock about two feet in diameter, and many smaller ones that rested against the bottom of the finger. She gave the big rock a hard shove, but it held tight, cemented to the ground by ice and snow.
“Give me a hand,” she said to Candace. Together, they pried and pushed the rock. At last, it budged, then rolled away, as if they were pushing the bottom ball of a snowman.
Katherine shone her light down on a small hole leading into the ground at the base of the large finger stone. “This is it! The entrance!”
The opening looked narrow, barely big enough for an adult to squeeze through. If Ruthie had come across it out hiking, she would have thought it was the den of a small animal—a fox or a skunk maybe—and passed it by.
Ruthie clicked on her flashlight and shone it into the narrow hole. The darkness seemed to eat up the beam of her light, and she couldn’t see how far back the tunnel went. “Are we sure this goes anywhere?” she asked, doubtful. What she was really thinking was, There’s no way in hell I’m climbing in there.
She suddenly had the feeling that this was all one big trick being played on her, that at any second everyone would start laughing, patting Ruthie on the back, saying, We sure fooled you! Her mother would even come out of hiding, in on the joke. Maybe it had all been her brainchild—a way to teach Ruthie some lesson about responsibility.
“One way to find out,” Candace said. “I’ll go first, but if you all don’t follow right behind, you can bet I’ll be back out in a jiffy. And I’m not going to be happy.” She patted the holster under her coat in case anyone missed the point.
“I don’t know about this,” Ruthie said. What kind of person actually uses the word “jiffy”? Particularly when threatening people with a gun?
“She doesn’t like small spaces,” Fawn explained to the others.
Understatement of the year, thought Ruthie.
“I’m not thrilled about it, either,” Candace said. “But, like it or not, that’s where we’ve got to go.”
Candace shoved her pack down into the hole, then took off her coat and pushed it in, too. The snowshoes she left leaning against the rock. Headlamp shining, she wiggled herself into the hole headfirst and seemed to get stuck midway.
“Maybe it’s not big enough. Maybe we can’t get through, or it’s just a dead end,” Ruthie said, beginning to sweat as she watched Candace struggle. Candace kicked her feet, writhed, and squirmed like a swimmer stuck on land. They heard muffled curse words from inside. Eventually, Candace’s feet disappeared. A few moments later, there was an echoing shout: “I’m in! Come on! Hurry! You’re not going to believe this!”
Katherine turned to the girls and began talking quickly and quietly. “I’ll go next,” she said. “I’ll take as long as I can getting in. But here’s what I want you girls to do.” She rummaged in her coat pocket and pulled out a set of keys. “Take the path that leads right down to the road. My car is parked about a quarter-mile past your driveway. It’s a black Jeep Cherokee. My cell phone’s in the glove compartment. Call for help. If there’s no signal, get in the car and go to the nearest house. Just get out of here. This Candace woman is clearly nuts, and I’m afraid she’s going to hurt someone with that gun she keeps waving around. I can hold her off for a while, give you a good head start.”