Mercy Snow (18 page)

Cal glanced toward Nate’s closed door. “Is he in or out?”

“He’s at Tommy’s for dinner.”

Cal sighed heavily, and only upon looking at him more closely did June notice the dark circles bruised under his eyes. “June, I need to tell you something.” The muscles in his jaw ridged and tensed the way they only ever did when he had bad news to share.

Was it the mill? Had he just laid men off, a threat he’d been faced with for months now? June knew he was trying to wait until after the holidays. But his tone was too soft for that, and there was a tremor in his bottom lip that mill matters had never invoked. Her stomach dropped.
No
, she thought,
just don’t
, but Cal kept talking, staring straight at her, still in his overcoat, the same one that had held Suzie’s mitten.

“I was in Berlin the night of the accident.”

June closed her eyes. Cal’s voice rushed at her as if down a long tunnel, gaining velocity.

“I met Suzie that night, June. Outside the movie theater. She
begged me for her father’s job back. That’s when she dropped her mitten.”

June opened her eyes.

“The one I know you got rid of.”

June knew that Cal wanted her to confirm what he’d just said—to explain what she’d done with the mitten. Instead she asked a question she didn’t really desire an answer to. “What were you doing in Berlin?”

Cal hesitated, but that was fine. June could wait. One of the Christmas boxes looked like it had been chewed on by mice, she noticed. She made a mental note to put poison out in the attic. Pests shouldn’t be allowed to multiply. “Were you alone in Berlin?”

No reply.

“You said it wouldn’t happen again.”

“I’m sorry.”

And he was. June could hear it in his voice along with… was it uncertainty? She thought back to the time when she’d found the strange bra after his trip to Boston. He’d been contrite then, too, but not anxious. Something else was wrong. June stepped closer to Cal, searching his eyes. In spite of everything, they had a life and a son together. Deep down she still loved him, and that was something. “What is it?” She almost reached out to cup his cheek but refrained, still badly stung by the confession he’d just made.

“I don’t know if Zeke really caused the accident.”

June sucked in her breath. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, I was on the road that night, too. I…” He trailed off. “I drove by his truck on the side of the road. It wasn’t him.”

June put a hand over her mouth. She worried she might be sick.

Cal stepped closer to her and lowered his voice, as if what he was going to say next could only be uttered in the most terrible of intimacies. “June, I can’t afford to let anyone in this town know, not now with the way things are at the mill, with layoffs coming after Christmas.”

June had hoped those wouldn’t go ahead for certain. It was just one more dreadful thing to keep secret. “Did anyone see you?”

“No. I’m pretty sure. Or if they did, they didn’t know it was me.”

“And your… appointment… in Berlin? What about her?” She couldn’t bring herself to call it anything else.

Cal clasped June’s hands in his. “That’s all over with. Please, you have to believe me.”

She bit her lip and considered. “Why are you telling me all this now?”

Cal slid his gaze away from hers. “I need you to do something.”

June blinked with frustration. Never in his life had he been spurred to action by love or conscience, only necessity. It was the way Titan Paper had operated since time immemorial, and Cal was first and foremost a mill man. She’d known that when she married him, but she hadn’t minded then. Of course, that was before the affairs, back when June had thought she still might change him just a little.

Downstairs, their phone started ringing. Cal clenched his jaw and made no move to answer it, and June understood what he was trying to tell her. It might be someone important, or it might not, but he would not jump to see. He meant what he’d said about ending the affair. If Cal’s life depended mainly on the operations of the mill, so by extension did hers. She wished now that she’d managed to destroy the mitten wholly and not
just hide it, but she could fix all that come spring, when the path to the cabin cleared and she could return. Cal need never know. Until then the item would be safe. No one would ever have any reason to link the likes of the McAllisters to such a business. She swallowed her tears. Funny how good intentions in a marriage could breed deception just as easily as they did intimacy. Maybe that was another one of the late Hetty’s lessons that June should have learned before now. She swiped the drops out of her eyes and looked properly at her husband for the first time in a long time. “What do you need me to do?” she asked.

J
une approached the Snow property with the heel-toe caution of a practiced tracker. Per Cal’s instructions she’d waited until it was nearly dusk to be sure no one would see her and had parked her car a little ways down Devil’s Slide Road, just before the turnoff to the clearing, not wanting to announce herself before she’d truly arrived. Back at home she’d left her holiday boxes lined down the hall. In the fridge there was a mix of brownie batter, and on the stove the kettle was primed and ready for tea when she returned.

From the road she followed a bumpy pathway to the oval clearing in the woods, the only level patch around here before the world tilted again and dropped to the chaos of the river. On the east side of the clearing, June could see the charred stone foundation of an old house, the chimney long since tumbled, the roof beams burned or, if salvageable, no doubt carried away for other enterprises. Next to it was the splintering hut of the smokehouse, the size and childish shape of a dwarf’s dwelling, and across from that a manifestly ugly vehicle of sorts was parked—top-heavy, fenders sagging, kitted out with a smokestack and mismatched
windows, and rusted beyond all decent hope. June gawped at it and wondered how they’d managed to drive it down the path she’d just walked, and then she wrapped her coat tighter around her and stepped daintily through a thicket of frozen weeds, wrenching her ankle on a crushed can hidden under the snow. She fought the urge to swear. What kind of people lived like this? she wondered. Dogs wouldn’t even.

A noise coming from the smokehouse caught her attention, and when she turned her head, June was surprised to see a child—a small figure swallowed by a huge, dirty parka. The girl seemed equally alarmed to catch sight of June. She stared up at her with the frozen dignity of an owl. In her hand June saw that the girl was carrying a book, marking her place with her thumb, the sign of a veteran reader, though she couldn’t have been more than eight, June thought. The girl assessed her and then, deciding it was safe enough, spoke. “Hello.” Her breath billowed in a fog around her narrow face.

June blinked. She knew every kid in Titan Falls, down to the babies, but she didn’t recognize this girl. Or did she? She looked closer. There was something familiar about the child’s greenish face and plain almond eyes. It was a smaller version of the late Pruitt Snow’s.

“Are you looking for the ghost?” the girl said.

June put a hand across her chest. “Excuse me?”

The child looked exasperated. “The ghost of the lady that used to live in this spot. She was right here. But when she heard us, she disappeared.”

In spite of the cold, June found that she’d begun to sweat. She loosened her scarf. “Ghosts aren’t real, you know.”

The girl shrugged. “This one was.”

“What’s your name?”

The girl cocked her head. “Hannah.”

The littlest Snow of them all. June took a step closer. “And what are you reading?”

Hannah tipped the book so June could see the laminated cover. “Ovid.” She pronounced it OH-vid. June raised her eyebrows in astonishment, but Hannah didn’t seem to notice. Instead she smoothed open the volume to the page she’d been marking and ran her hand over the paper. She looked vaguely ashamed. “I stole this out of a library in Maine because it’s the kind of book I knew I’d never be through with. I’m on the part now about Phaeton”—she stumbled over the name—“who tries to drive a chariot across the sky, but gets killed by Jupiter. Phaeton’s sisters are so sad they turn into amber trees.”

Amazed, June looked at the dirty sheen on the girl’s coat, the cracked boots one size too big, the pants that only came to her ankles, and remembered that when Suzie had been that age, she’d never wanted to read but was always moving with the casual lope of a wild horse. Just then June noticed a glint of silver nestled in the bulk of the girl’s parka. She looked harder. It was a man’s silver cuff link, a piece of yarn wound around it like a necklace charm. How odd. Before the child could object, June lifted the bauble and then quickly dropped it as if she’d been scalded, seeing the points of the
M
sharply carved in the metal. She knew this object. She knew it very well, in fact, for Cal had its mate in a box in his top bureau drawer. It had belonged to his father, but he’d only inherited the one.

“What?” The girl looked puzzled.

“Where did you get this?” June’s voice came out harsher than she meant it to.

Hannah clasped a protective hand over the cuff link and stuffed it back inside the neck of her parka. She cocked her chin at a stubborn angle. “I found it. Finders keepers.”

“In the smokehouse?”

Hannah didn’t answer, and June took a step closer, knocking her boot heel against a stone. It was so very easy to trip out here. The footing was uncertain, the land slicked with patches of effluvia, and deep down in the ravine, June knew, the river’s current was deceptive.

“The Androscoggin carries away what it wants and then returns what it doesn’t,” Hetty had warned June before her marriage. “All of us from Titan Falls know this, and those who don’t know it deserve whatever comes to them.” June had taken the warning for what it was and said nothing, but now she wondered if her mother-in-law had perhaps been trying to get her to make a crucial choice before it was too late: stay or go, flee or return, one or the other, but never both, not in this place.

Down below in the notch of the ravine now, June could hear the river eddies rustling, devious as a covered basket of snakes, some of which would charm and others strike. In her pocket she had a lump of cash. It was more money than she thought she and Cal needed to offer, but no matter. It would cover a fresh start for the family someplace else. Anyplace else.

June thought about the laundry she had waiting back at home, the grocery list she’d hung on the refrigerator, the list of bills piled on her desk, their envelopes flapped open like little parched tongues. The clock on the landing would be ticking like a bone grinding in its socket.

She studied Hannah. There were a million reasons she knew she should just offer the money and then walk away from the girl—more than a million, probably—but they were no match
for the sudden and paralyzing stroke of doubt June was suffering. What if Cal was wrong? What if he couldn’t just make all this go away? What if he
shouldn’t
?

June took a step closer to the child, half expecting her to vanish, but she did not. It was so cold in this hollow, June felt like she might crack. She couldn’t imagine a little girl enduring it. She bent down and spoke softly. “Would you like to come with me for some dinner? Also, I have some books you might like to see.” She did have them, too—somewhere. Nate’s old adventure tomes and her own mythology texts from college. Tales of pirates and gods and knights with shining swords. She could wash Hannah’s clothes, June thought, while the brownies plumped in the oven and the child ate a bowl of stew, and then she could give her a hot bath and wrap her in a huge, fluffy towel. Maybe she could even teach her to knit. June could almost feel what it would be like to sit shoulder to shoulder with Hannah on the sofa and cup her delicate hands in the larger nests of her own while she worked the girl’s fingers around the yarn, just the way she’d always longed to do with a daughter.

Hannah took an uncertain step sideways, folding her book closed back on her thumb. Her gaze flicked quickly over June’s shoulder to the bank of trees behind her, growing black with the late afternoon’s shadows. “Thanks, but I’m not supposed to go anywhere. My sister would get hopping mad if I did.”

“Where’s your sister now?”

“Over at Hazel Bell’s. She’s looking after the sheep. Soon, if I’m good, she’s going to take me to see them.” She said it with a measure of pride, the way other children boasted about visits to theme parks or motels with swimming pools. “And I’m starting school soon, too, just like I’m supposed to, so don’t you worry.” June’s eyes narrowed. She had forgotten all about Hazel Bell
hiring the Snow girl, but then, before this accident, people often overlooked Hazel. She was as reclusive as a barn owl and twice as canny. June had always found the business with those so-called sugar-baby stones in the trees distasteful in the extreme.

She shook herself back to her senses. Hazel and her sugar babies were excellent reminders of why it didn’t do to go digging up secrets in Titan Falls. The nonsense out here with Gert’s bones was bad enough. June eyed the string with the cuff link around Hannah’s neck again. It was tucked away now under the girl’s coat. June sincerely hoped it remained that way. If she got rid of the one Cal had, there would be nothing to tie the family name to this place. Without further ado, all business again, June pulled the envelope containing the cash and written offer out of her pocket. “Here,” she said, handing it to Hannah, glad to know that at least one person in the family could read. “Give this to your sister. It’s
very
important. Do you understand?” She paused. She was struck with an urge to pass on to the child some kind of benediction or blessing. Instead she found herself proffering a threat. “And tell her she ought to be taking better care of you. Tell her…” June hesitated again. Why was she even getting involved? This child was nothing to do with her and never would be. “Just say that we have standards in this town, and people who aren’t afraid to enforce them. Do you understand?”