Mercy Snow (21 page)

Hazel could not. Fred Flyte was as pickled as a barrel of Swedish herring.

But June wasn’t finished. “You’ll never guess what he’s gone and done.”

“What?” In spite of herself, Hazel was intrigued.

“He’s gone and applied for Fergus’s job driving the tow truck and plow.”

“What?” Hazel’s head snapped upright.

“Yes. And Horton says if Fred stays properly sober another two weeks, he’ll take him on. He can’t afford to be down a driver during snow season, and he feels sorry for the family.”

Hazel sat thinking. Fergus might never recover, or he might take years to do it. Of course Horton wasn’t going to hold a job for him, but still. It needled her to think that life was moving on so fast. And it irked her more to think that Mercy might somehow be the one urging it along.

“I think”—June touched the tips of her pink fingers to that
treacherous spot above her heart again—“that perhaps you’re being a bit too kind for your own good here, Hazel. I can understand you needing the extra help, especially now with Fergus, but really, I think you should consider that you may have a wolf in sheep’s clothing in this girl.”

Hazel blinked at June’s choice of metaphor, wondering if it was deliberate, but before she could decide, June continued.

“These Snows have brought nothing but trouble since they’ve arrived. Zeke’s
wanted
, you know.” She shook her head. “I think it would be best if they left.”

Wasn’t that just like a McAllister, Hazel thought. Playing with people’s lives as if they were dolls in a playhouse. Paper dolls. She folded her arms. “You can’t simply up and make them leave town.” Was the old Snow homestead even
in
the limits of Titan Falls? Hazel wasn’t sure.

These details didn’t seem to concern June. “No,” she simpered. “Of course not. But neither do we have to give them any reason to stay.” She shifted a little, inching closer to the edge of the sofa. The worn cushion buckled and threatened to pitch her headfirst onto the coffee table, but June regained her balance. “Actually, the truth is, Hazel, I came here to ask you an enormous favor. I was wondering if you might take Nate on for some work. I know you were advertising earlier this year, but Nate was so busy with football.”

“What about his job in the mill? It’s going to be his one day, after all. I’d think he’d want to learn to run it.”

June shook her head, her hair falling in a regretful wave along her cheek. “Nate hasn’t been himself since the accident. He’s angry. He quit the hockey team, he doesn’t want to see anyone, and I’m worried about his grades.” She hesitated. “I’m not sure working with his father is a good idea right now.”

“But working out here is?” Hazel folded her arms.

“I think it could be, yes. Please, Hazel. You don’t have to answer now, but think about it.” June drew herself together and arose, the wool of her trousers falling as crisp and neat as if it had never been sat upon. Upstairs, Hazel heard the bedsprings squeak and then Fergus cry out. She flinched. June cast her eyes toward the ceiling, then back to the spinning wheel. “Spun anything good lately?”

Hazel stayed on her stool. “It’s the wrong season. Shearing’s not for a few more months yet. I’m almost out of wool.”

“Oh, that’s too bad. I imagine with Fergus out like this you must be relying on your sales. I can help with that. Nate and I both. Or”—June stepped out to the little hall where Hazel had hung her coat, leaving Hazel no choice but to follow and hope that Fergus would be fine for a few more moments—“I could make it difficult. It would be terrible if my sewing circle broke up, wouldn’t it? We’ve been such a good source of revenue for you. But I’ve been thinking lately about taking up something more highbrow. Watercolors, perhaps.”

Hazel swung open the front door, letting in the tingling air. In the distance she could see the hunched form of Mercy wending her way back to the house with an armload of firewood, snow dusted all up her legs. From this far she could be anything or anyone—male or female, a friend or a foe, a live soul or the walking dead. Hazel suddenly wasn’t sure of anything anymore. “Okay,” she said quietly. One thing sheep taught you was when to call a spade a spade. They were not creatures of subtlety. Instead, they brought you straight down to the elements: weather, feed, the values of their skins and wool. Everything with sheep was very basic.

June pulled her fancy gloves on with the alarming grace of a
snake slipping back into skin it had shed. “Oh, wonderful! Nate will be so pleased. I can’t wait to tell him. Shall we have him begin after the holidays, to give everyone time to get used to the idea? Also, that should give you time to handle your situation.” She glanced at the approaching figure of Mercy. “So sad,” she said, “but really, what else can we do? Their problems are not ours.”

Without further ado she clipped across the porch and picked her way back to her car, leaving Hazel to linger in her front doorway and consider all the ways that statement was not true before giving in to the fact that there wasn’t a damned thing she could do about it.

I
n spite of the many headstones that populated it, the little graveyard adjacent to St. Bartholomew’s was almost always deserted. That fact was easy enough to ignore during the bursts of autumn foliage and the early buds of spring, but not come winter when the woods around town thickened into streaks of gray and black and there wasn’t anything else by way of visual distraction in the village—nothing green or sweet, just a cold so fierce it raised welts on people’s cheeks and bit the fingers of those foolish enough to go without gloves. It wasn’t, June reflected, that the people of Titan Falls didn’t love their departed; it was just that they knew firsthand the futility of commemorating them in such weather. It was one of the many problems of life in a mill town. Like it or not, people were constantly forced to make terrible choices—between food and heat, fixing their cars or patching their roofs, sending their sons or their daughters out to work instead of school—and then had to bear the consequences of those decisions. So no. No one had time to mourn, especially not in winter.

The first layer of snow that fell on Suzie Flyte’s grave was a mere sprinkling of the finality yet to come. It landed as light and free as a bridal veil, giving the town time to get used to
the idea of her absence. Soon, however, as December lengthened and passed and the bulk of the weather set in, a thicker layer replaced the delicate flakes, and then another and another, until by mid-February even Suzie’s granite headstone was nothing more than a blunt white memory. That didn’t stop Dena, however, from battling her daily way through the elements to the spot where her daughter lay. Sometimes the townswomen saw Dena hunched over the grave, an ice witch haunting her lair, and though they debated the necessity of going and fetching her, none of them ever dared to. She sat for as long as she could in the cold, the red scrap of Suzie’s remaining mitten clutched in her hands—a slap of color that reminded June of things she would rather not face.

Against all odds it was Fred who’d taken up the necessary tasks of the couple’s survival—doing the shopping once a week in the Millers’ general store, shoveling their short little drive, chopping wood out back with the chawed butt of a cigar clamped between his molars, the very picture of health, and for that he could thank Mercy Snow.

He’d come stumbling home from Lucky’s the week before Christmas to find Dena sitting in the darkened kitchen, contemplating a jar of cloudy liquid. “What is it?” he’d slurred, and she’d blinked at him.

“I don’t half know. It’s for you. I found it in the letter box with a note. Says it’s from that Snow girl.”

At first Fred had been hesitant to drink the concoction. Any man would be after the load of gossip he’d heard circulating about Mercy down at the tavern.

“Why’s she so damn attached to her big brother anyway?” Arch had pondered aloud over his fourth beer. “Seems like they might be just a little
too
close, if you know what I’m saying.
Perhaps that boy’s on the run for some other reasons we don’t know about.”

That produced a salacious chuckle from the other men at the bar.

“Maybe she’s got a past, too. Girl that age with no man around to speak of. How do you think she’s paying the bills? I bet it ain’t all by virtue of Hazel’s sheep. Betcha she’s got a few rams of her own on the side, if you know what I mean.”

Fred had shifted on his stool. He was an irrepressible souse, but deep down he was still a father and a churchgoing man. Even whirling drunk he was uncomfortable with the direction the conversation was taking. He spun his empty glass on the bar. “I don’t guess I’ll ever get my old job on the mill floor back now, what with the newest round of damn layoffs I hear is coming.”

A chilly pause swept over the bar. Fred had just committed the conversational equivalent of poking a branch into a hornet’s nest. Mill talk at the bar was generally confined to the terms of the latest betting pool, grisly recaps of past accidents, and snide comments about coworkers’ hygiene and sexuality. Len, the barkeep, was in thick with Cal, and the men lived in fear of being accused of cozying up to state river inspectors, courting union organizers, or otherwise plotting against the hand that fed them. When layoffs like the looming ones occurred, half the men in the bar drank with resentment glowing in their bellies and the other half with guilt, but no one ever uttered a word about the cause of all that grief.

Arch quickly did the first thing he could think of to save the situation. “Wonder if that little Snow bitch and her brother are connected to the downturn. First they almost kill our kids, then our jobs hit the dirt. If they don’t leave soon, we’ll all be going up in flames.”

“Don’t forget about Gert’s bones,” Tyler Wall put in, adding to Mercy’s perceived crimes. “I tell you. Finding them was no accident. She’s up to something out there.”

Fred Flyte finished his shot in silence, regretting the shit storm of superstition and bitterness he’d apparently unleashed on what he was increasingly sure was an innocent girl. When he arrived home and found the jar of liquid left by Mercy, along with instructions to drink all the contents at once, he was reluctant to do so, but he also felt he owed it to her.

The drink was far fouler than anything Fred Flyte had ever ingested in a bar, but, amazingly, it provoked in him such a revulsion to alcohol that he would no longer even walk on the same side of the street as Lucky’s. Sober enough for real work, but still locked out of the mill, Fred beat all the other men about to lose their jobs to the punch and took over Fergus’s routes with the tow-truck company. Maybe it was from spending his days seated after a lifetime of standing up, or maybe it was all the solitary reflection that driving afforded him, but in the weeks that followed the tragedy of the accident, Fred slowly plumped back to life, his cheeks fattening under the flaps of his hunter’s cap, the broken tooth cupped in the front of his mouth seemingly whiter if no less snaggled. It was as if he were privy to some forthcoming news that no one in town knew about yet but which, when it arrived, would blind them all with good fortune.

“Honestly,” Abel Goode said to June outside the Millers’ general store in February. “He’s as straight as a preacher now.”

June frowned. So far none of her plans to get rid of the Snows were working. Her bribe, generous in the extreme, had been rejected, so she had done the next-best thing and gotten the girl fired, but even the threat of starvation wasn’t doing anything. What had Hetty always said? The devil loved idle hands? June
hoped she hadn’t made a tactical error in giving Mercy more time to get up to mischief, but this latest news about Fred was not encouraging. First the miracle of Fergus and now another one with the hopeless Fred Flyte. June didn’t need the town to start turning to Mercy as some kind of saint. The next thing she knew, they’d be clamoring for her to fix the situation at the mill, and then where would June and Cal be?

She pictured the trashy little clearing where the RV stood, or more accurately
leaned
. Anyone could see it was a place past its prime, had it ever even possessed one. And that poor child. Dirty hair. Raggedy fingernails. A little bubble of compassion welled in June’s chest. Mercy and her brother, June could scorn, but the child didn’t deserve that kind of life. A small part of June thought she should do something about it and call social services on the so-called family, but who was to say the girl would be put anywhere better? The life of a foster child, June knew, was not a happy one, and much as she wished to see the Snows gone, she didn’t wish to see them completely ruined. Not Hannah at least.

June shifted her grocery sack on her hip and narrowed her eyes. The only hope was for Abel to catch that criminal Zeke or, better yet, find his lifeless body. With winter set in good and well, he’d freeze to death in the woods if he wasn’t careful. “I would have thought you’d be holding that boy in custody by now.”

“I agree,” Abel said. “He’s been gone two-plus months. Damn me if he isn’t either an ice cube or coyote food. At this point if we find a scrap of him, it’ll be a miracle.”

Miracles again. June was getting sick of them. “Well, he’s guilty as the day is long.” Abel shot her a sour look, and June quickly shut up, for she knew what Abel must be thinking—that if the mill layoffs went on much longer or got much worse,
he’d have to deal with trouble far closer to home. June sniffed, offended. It wasn’t Cal’s fault that competition overseas was getting worse, the jobs shipping off like reverse mail-order brides. No one liked change. That was a fact. Not even Abel, which June saw as an advantage.

She had avoided the accident site, but she wondered now if everything out there was all cleaned up: Gert’s remains, and the twinkling bits of smashed windows, and the gouges the bus had left down to the bottom of the ravine where the Androscoggin gurgled and danced under ice, like a bad woman’s legs under heavy skirts. “Gert’s bones,” June suddenly demanded. “What’s been done with them?”

Abel pushed his hat back on his fat head. He saw that June’s mouth was a drawn bow, and for a moment he felt a stab of pity for her. She was clearly never bred for a life of mill grit, and yet here she was anyway, full in it, half freezing in front of the town’s crappy general store, staring down the knowledge that her husband might not be any better than the hard drinkers and lotharios who worked for him. And that wasn’t even the worst of what Abel suspected of the McAllister men. He sighed. “Why do you care?”

June considered. She recalled the sound of the river turning around its bend down at the bottom of Devil’s Slide Road. Such a place for a woman to live and die, she thought, bathed in the floating filaments of the town, almost completely covered over by them. Almost, but not quite. “It seems like someone should,” she finally said.

Abel couldn’t argue that. “Someone does. The coroner went ahead and cremated them. The ashes were given back to the Snows. The eldest girl took them, since she was the nearest relative.”

June’s lips puckered. In the distance there were a gaggle of approaching footsteps and wagging tongues. “I’m having the ladies for a sewing circle, as you can see.”

Abel readjusted his hat and turned to leave before he was surrounded and possibly drowned in feminine chatter. Before he could get gone, however, June waylaid him. “Do me a favor. If you see Cal, don’t tell him we spoke about Gert. And one other thing. I want those ashes. Promise me you’ll bring them.”

Inwardly Abel cursed everything from the top of the mill tower to the bottoms of his own two boot soles. The hardest part of his job was never what he found out; it was always what he had to keep quiet. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll get you the remains.” Didn’t want to but would. The McAllisters kept him in feed and office, after all. Abel had learned the hard way that keeping the peace was the wise course in Titan Falls, even if it meant bending the law a dogleg to do it.

W
ith the ritual care of a medieval monk, June laid seven silver needles out on a tray, along with a selection of brightly colored silken threads. The slivers of metal glinted in the hard afternoon sun—a row of tiny sabers arrayed for inspection before battle. She couldn’t be too careful when it came to hosting her group of ladies, June knew. There was no telling what loose threads they might notice, what crumb might have gone uncollected in a darkish corner, and wouldn’t they love that, June thought, to find a crack in the McAllister fortress that they could worry and widen?

The women were embroidering a hanging for the children’s section of the library in memory of Suzie. It was a scene of an apple tree, its gnarled canopy divided into quadrants, one for
each season. June was working on the spring panel, knotting tiny blossoms and flecking them with the merest hint of pale green leaves that widened and unfurled toward summer. She rolled the muslin pieces out now, placing them in order, stark branches, then the same limbs blooming into cautious life before erupting into fiery reds and golds.
Resurrection
, June thought. It was a fitting theme, the simplest mystery of all, even here in Titan Falls. Fergus had come back from the dead. Out of his daughter’s passing, Fred Flyte had been brought back to his senses, though whether that was a good thing or not remained to be seen.