Mercy Snow (33 page)

S
heep were so stupid, June thought as she skirted the edge of the sugar bush, looking for Cal. And she wasn’t much better, it seemed. All this time she’d thought she could keep the McAllister secrets as boxed and neatly categorized as her Christmas ornaments, but that was pure folly. She had the terrible feeling that her life was snarling into an unholy mess, knotting its way into fearsome and unexpected shapes she would have no hope of ever untangling.

In the meadow out in front of her, Hazel’s flock was grazing. Unlike the prehistoric, tropical creatures June had grown up around—alligators and sharks, snakes and terrapins—sheep were herd animals to a fault. If one of the members bolted, the others would do the same, bleating as if already caught. On the other hand, gain one beast’s interest and you’d soon have them all eating out of the palm of your hand, just as her roommates in college were always trying to do with men. She pictured the party where she’d met Cal, her in a plaid old maid’s skirt, him telling a joke to a group of doll-like blond girls with ruby lips and dollar signs in their eyes. He’d been drawn to her because
she was different, because she was nothing like those brash, glittering specimens, but what he didn’t know—what she’d never told him—was that she’d wanted to be exactly the same as them.

From her place in the trees, June watched as the man she’d married, borne a child with, and was starting to grow old with pulled an apple chunk from his pocket and held his palm flat until one of the ewes approached and snuffled at the fruit. The rest of the sheep bleated and crowded closer.

Maybe it was the discrepancy of sun versus shadow or the distance from which she was viewing him, but June suddenly saw her husband the way another woman might—his mistress, maybe, or even, long ago, June herself. He was still adamantly good-looking. Bushy-haired and muscular, his jaw pleasingly square. His hands were tender along the palms and tough on the knuckles. His wrists were solid, and he walked like he wasn’t afraid of anything in the world, this husband of hers, this adored only son, heir to a paper fortune. But hadn’t he also proved himself to be a cheater and a liar? He’d caused a bus crash that had almost killed his son and did kill his son’s best friend, and, like June, he was hell-bent on covering it up.

June felt a wave of sickness wash over her. Her mouth flooded, and she bent at the waist, afraid she might vomit. She thought of what Cal had said to her in his office—that he could make everything go back to the way it used to be, but that was the worst idea in the world. Ever since Smith, going back to her old life had always been June’s biggest fear. Now, for the first time, she wondered if it had to be. Could it perhaps be possible to return to a place without also reverting to the person you used to be there? June had never thought so, but she wasn’t so sure anymore.

When she straightened up again, she saw that Cal was closing in on a tiny lamb with a black spot down near its tail, gamboling
a little bit apart from its mother. A wild animal would never let a stranger approach its babe, June thought as she watched Cal. She wouldn’t have. But it was okay, she reassured herself. In a few hours, the lamb would be returned, reunited with the ewe, its displacement forgotten. She and Cal just needed to borrow it.

What happened next was not part of the plan. Cal was supposed to catch the lamb and quickly take it to the truck. He would tie it up near Devil’s Slide Road, making it look as if Mercy or Zeke had poached it. Instead June watched with helpless dismay as Cal drew a hunting knife out of his pocket.
Where did that come from
? she wondered as he straddled the lamb’s tiny back, yanked its neck up, and drew the blade hard across its windpipe, releasing a shockingly dark flow of blood. The lamb shrieked once, then crumpled between Cal’s legs as the other sheep ran away in confused panic. The mother ewe went with them but came trotting back halfway, torn between the close safety of the flock and the loss of her offspring. Trying not to be sick, June watched as Cal wiped the blade in the grass and then reached into his pocket and withdrew a bright child’s hat with a pom-pom on it. It was the same one Hannah had left behind during her lunch with June. This last detail had been June’s idea. Sometimes, she’d explained to Cal as she handed over the hat, it took the sacrifice of an innocent to bring about a right. Abel had seen Hannah wearing this very hat. He might not want to hear June’s complaints about the Snows, but after Hazel started haranguing him with physical evidence, he’d have to listen.

June covered her face with her hands.
Hannah
, she thought. What would happen to her? June had only meant to imply thieving, not a slaying, but Cal had gone and changed the story on her, upping the stakes without asking her permission. The Snows would be blamed, and this time, maybe, Hannah really
would be removed from her sister’s care. And no one would ever want a girl like that.
I have to go get her
, June thought.
I have to try to fix what’s just been done.

A soft voice came floating out of the trees. “He’s not here.”

Sweating, June turned and saw Dena Flyte drifting toward her through the dappled shadow of the wood, squinting in the sudden light. Quickly June stepped farther into the shade of the sugar bush, trying to block Dena’s view of the meadow. “What?”

Dena’s gaze was probing. “Nate. He’s not here.”

“Oh. I see.” June’s heart was racing. Had Dena heard the death bleat of the lamb? Had she seen Cal bending over it? She prayed that he went straight to the truck he’d parked on the road instead of seeking her out. How could she explain his presence to Dena? She swallowed and tried to calm her nerves. “I… didn’t expect to run into anyone out here.”

Dena offered no explanation. She must have put a stone in the sugar bush, June reasoned, although Suzie was neither an infant nor a victim of the river’s ills.

Dena smiled. “If you want, I could tell you where he is.”

For a moment June was tempted to snap that it wasn’t necessary, she could find her own son, but she didn’t want to antagonize Dena. She wriggled her sweating hands in her pockets and tried to look patient. “That would be very kind of you.”

“You’re not going to like the answer.”

“Dena, for heaven’s sake.”

Dena’s gaze turned canny. “You bought him a new car.”

“Yes.”

“Well, he went spinning off in it today, happy as a lark, but he wasn’t alone. Not hardly.”

“Who was he with?” Nate hadn’t been close to any of his old friends in months now, but June’s heart skipped a beat to think
that he might be coming out of his shell at long last. Maybe things were going to be fine in the end.

A cold smile June hadn’t known Dena was capable of spread across her face as she looked June straight in the eye.
She saw everything
, June realized just as Dena spoke.

“He was with Mercy Snow.”

June fled. Things were so far from fine they were in a different realm.

H
azel knew immediately that something was terribly wrong in the meadow. Sheep didn’t lie. They couldn’t, and that was the best and worst single element about them. They were naked in their needs, bald in their dependence, and if she thought about that fact too much, it always broke Hazel’s heart just a little, for who was she to be given the charge of such splendid and simple creatures?

Normally the sheep rushed her when she came at them with a bucket full of extra feed, but today something had them spooked. Hazel paced across the field, enjoying the late-afternoon sun against her bare arms and the squeak of damp grass underneath her boots. Just that morning Fergus had said her name clearly for the first time since his homecoming, and the sound of it still rang in her heart hopeful and fierce. Spring was finally here. The lambs had been born, the frozen fields had thawed, and Fergus was coming back to her—maybe not the same as before, maybe not all of him ever again, but enough so that life could go reasonably on.

She was so lost in gratitude that she almost didn’t spot the scrap of Hannah’s hat. The rough breeze had caught the woolen strands of the pom-pom and was playing with them lazily. Frowning, Hazel stepped closer and then froze at the
abomination stretched out at her boots. She crouched down over the dead lamb’s still body and pressed a thumb into the blood spilled in the grass. It was cool, but not yet congealed. Hazel rose and glanced around, a rage building so fast inside her that it reminded her of the moment when the ice plates cracked on the river and spun to life in the spring current.

She dragged the lamb to the edge of the field as the sheep watched from a wary distance. How much misfortune was one woman supposed to bear in the course of a single year? Hazel wondered, then pushed that thought out of her mind. This was a time not for self-pity but action. First she would bury the poor lamb, and then, when she was done, so help her God, she was going to get to the bottom of this mess.

A
man set loose in the Great North Woods quickly discovered that he had two immediate choices on his hands. He could go mad from the vast quiet surrounding him or he could learn to use all that silence to his advantage. Over the past few months, Zeke hadn’t stuck as close to Titan Falls as Mercy probably believed. Most of the time, it was true, he was right there in close proximity to his sisters, watching them with the stony stare of a hawk, noting everything going on before him but giving away nothing. He knew, for example, that Mercy had begun meeting Nate in the sugar bush and how she really felt about him. He’d observed Mercy wending her way back to Devil’s Slide Road after time spent with Nate, her elbows cocked jauntily, a tickle of a smile dancing on her lips, and the feeling had struck him in the gut like a drunk’s sloppy fist—that Mercy
wasn’t
all alone, that one day she might move on, leaving him stuck permanently alone out here in the trees. So as not to be forgotten, he tried to
remind her of himself. He left trinkets for Hannah, deposited game at the RV step, chopped wood in the dead of night, but none of it was enough. Over the course of the winter, his sisters had grown thin, then truly frail, until Zeke worried they really would disappear. When he’d found that downed ram out at Hazel Bell’s, the temptation had been too great and he’d taken it, ashamed that his own hunting skills hadn’t been enough to keep his sisters in feed.

Zeke didn’t mind hunger for himself. In prison he’d dropped down to the bone and hadn’t gained much back since his release. In fact, he rather thought deprivation might be his new permanent condition, and he was fine with that. It made life on the run so much easier, but it pained him to watch that process devour Mercy and Hannah. For what it was worth, Zeke was still the man of their family such as it was, and it began to occur to him that he ought to be doing more than just causing trouble.

And so, for the first time in his life, he’d started to listen—to the erstwhile advice of his dead mother, to his own lousy conscience, to the scolding of the winter wind through the bare branches. And he began to hear what he had never bothered to before in any of his travels: the long narrative threads of a specific place that made it more than just a series of random bar fronts, convenience stores, food pantries, and a quick road out.

Moreover, Zeke found to his surprise that
he
was part of the story. At least he was as of dawn today when he’d snuck out to the ravine. He knew he shouldn’t have lingered, but he’d whittled a little twig angel for Hannah, and he wanted to leave it for her in the smokehouse. He smiled when he saw all her battered treasures lined up on the old shelf: her pilfered library books with titles he couldn’t even pronounce, curling scraps of wire, stray buttons, and, tossed under the three iron hooks, a dented coffee can. Idly he looked inside, first
thinking it was empty, but then he spotted something Hannah had never bothered with or maybe just never noticed—some sepia pieces of paper wound to the inner curve of the tin like a second skin.

He pulled them out eagerly. The ink was faded and the type smeared on the first piece of paper, but the seals looked official enough and there was no mistaking the name printed across the top:
“The Duncan Home for Girls.”
Zeke peered closer at the writing. It seemed to be some type of record of admittance from fifty or so years ago—no names, just the circumstances and dates of children deposited. The second paper was an invoice. Zeke didn’t think too much of it until he read the name Henry McAllister next to a surprisingly sizable amount.