Mercy Snow (15 page)

The phone rang, shrill as a crow, and Cal jumped. June was still sleeping. Everyone else was off for the day. There was only one person he could think of who might try to call him here on a Sunday, and he’d vowed that he would never let himself so much as look at her again. The phone continued to ring four, five more times, then fell into defeated silence. Cal opened the ledger book, found his place, and took a deep breath. First to order the mill accounts. Then he’d go to St. Bart’s and take care of his own.

H
olding on to saplings and various trees for support, Mercy made her way early on the morning of Suzie’s funeral down what looked like a deer trail to the bottom of the ravine, where the river bent and pooled in a big angry turn, its waters beating back against themselves, putting up a hard fight. With every inch she gained on the river, Mercy stepped more slowly, making sure of her footing. To fall into the maw of the Androscoggin alone out here would be disastrous, she knew. She took off her hat and wiped sweat from her forehead, staring at the churn of the current.

If she followed the bank north a little ways, she’d come to the site of the crash. The bus had since been winched up with no small amount of trouble by a towing crew, snapping branches and uprooting small trees as it went, leaving a long and painful scar gouged into the earth. There were no doubt plenty of
things of interest left behind and overlooked, but Mercy wasn’t concerned with them. Thus she chose to walk south, doubling back on her route, but lower down now, skirting the river. The tree line thinned as she stepped along the bank, avoiding the water that so terrified her. She walked for several minutes, then paused and let out a three-beat warble of a whistle.

It was the hunting signal Zeke had taught her, the one that just she and her brother knew. Four days she’d waited to try it, only to hear resounding silence. She pursed her lips and blew again, not expecting anything different, but this time she heard a faint rustle and then looked into the trees just in time to see her brother darting out of them. He motioned her to thicker cover, putting a finger to his lips. “We got to make this fast,” he whispered, looking around nervously. “They’ve had dogs out here.”

“Hey,” Mercy said softly, her eyes widening. One of
his
eyes was swollen, and the other was bloodshot. His left cheek was bruised, and his bottom lip had a cut with dried blood crusted on it. He slid down onto the ground and tried to smile. “Guess I missed Thanksgiving.”

Mercy shrugged, then took off the pack she was carrying and sank onto the ground as well. She’d brought some stale bread and the last hunk of the government cheese Zeke had scored in Berlin when they’d arrived. “You didn’t miss much.” She thought of the green-bean recipe she’d pilfered from Hazel’s homemaking magazine, which was still folded in her coat pocket. It seemed like a coded fragment from another life—one to which she’d lost the key.

Zeke took the food gratefully, but to her surprise he didn’t immediately begin to devour it. He had to be hungry, though. Four days in the woods. Even if he’d been poaching game, he’d still be starved for bread, for something hot and satisfying.
Zeke regarded Mercy warily. He seemed to be waiting for her to speak, and when she didn’t, he went ahead and filled the growing silence. “Did Hazel fire you yet?”

Mercy’s head snapped up. This was so typical of her brother. Here she’d been worried sick about him, and he greeted her not with reciprocal concern, or even with thanks for the food, but with an accusation. That was Zeke, though. He was capable of great tenderness, she knew, but only on his terms.

Zeke nudged her. “Well, did she?”

“No. Of course not.”

He snorted. “You think she still trusts you?”

Mercy jutted her chin and said nothing.

“It’s not bound to last, you know.”

Zeke reached over and gently touched her on the shoulder. “When will you and Hannah be ready to leave? I can manage in the woods fine, but I think for all our sakes it’d be better if we hit the road sooner rather than later. They’re going to string me up if they find me.”

Mercy bent her legs and pressed her lips against the knees of her dirty jeans. Her ass was getting wet from sitting, but that was her own damn fault. She knew better than to plant herself on the bare ground. Zeke had imparted that to her. He’d taught her everything about life in the woods. Which side of trees moss grew on. How to tell when a storm was brewing. Not to dampen your own fool butt by plopping it on the ground. But there was terrain in the world, Mercy was beginning to realize, that only a woman was equipped to navigate.

It wouldn’t be difficult to leave. She could have everything ready in less than an hour. The RV had half a tank of gas, enough to get them some distance. Maybe they could try driving south, down to the warm Gulf waters, or out to the Rockies.
They’d have to pick up work on the way, but surely they’d find something. Enough to get by. They were experts in that.

Then Mercy pictured how Hannah’s face would crumple when Mercy told her to gather her things and get a move on. Hannah was counting down the days until she started real school, and she loved the little library in town, where, for the first time, she had a card in her own name.

Mercy chewed a thumbnail. They hadn’t been in Titan Falls long, but already she could feel the beginnings of strings tying them to the place. It wouldn’t be so terribly hard to break them, but Mercy found that she didn’t want to. She thought about the Christmas when Zeke had presented Hannah with those butterflies. This year was bound to be just as lean, but surely they could get a tree and decorate it. Mercy could sew some ornaments from rags, and Zeke could carve Hannah something whimsical out of fir or knotty pine—a cat with a moving tail or a bird you could blow into and make it whistle. He was clever enough with his knife to do it, to make a whole menagerie come to life out of the dullest wood. Hannah was getting to an age where she would benefit from a steady home, but Mercy wasn’t sure she could do it alone. Without Zeke she could provide shelter, but not a real family. And besides, this land was theirs.

She pushed her knees back down onto the wet earth and regarded her brother. Even separated from him by more than a ravine, she would always be able to see the good streak that ran through him, shiny as a seam of metal in a mine, but it pained her that no one else could perceive that. It was as if there were two Zekes superimposed cockeyed on top of each other: the mute and ill-spoken public version versus the loving brother. All Mercy wanted to do was to twist the lens and bring the two together.

She focused back on the ravine. They didn’t have much time if she was going to voice her suspicions about the accident. Ever since she’d seen that mud on Cal McAllister’s car, they’d been building in her like a bank of angry storm clouds. This was her chance to let them go. She turned on her brother, fury growing in her. “Look me in the eye and tell me if you were the one who really caused that crash.”

Zeke slid his gaze away again to some unidentifiable point in the middle distance. It was an old trick of his—getting lost in time and space. “Does it matter? You know I’ve done enough bad shit that it was gonna catch up to me sometime.”

Mercy put her hands on her thighs. Her palms were sweating. She opened them, her fingers tingling like they’d fallen asleep. The angrier she grew with her brother, the more her hands burned, and she wondered if this is what Arlene had felt when she laid hands on someone to do a healing. Maybe there was a finer line than Mercy had ever imagined between great anger and great love, and without the one you would never be able to feel the other. “Yours aren’t the only tire prints on that road. I saw that clear as day.”

Zeke clenched his teeth. “Mine are the only ones that matter.”

Mercy sighed, frustrated. Ever since Zeke had come out of jail, it was like he was both
here
and
there
all the time, tuned to two channels at once so he never got any kind of clear picture going in his head. One minute he’d be gutting a strung-up deer like he’d done a thousand times before, his jeans sitting low on his hips, a cigarette dangling from his mouth, and the next his eyes would go glassy and gray, as if his soul had been swept away in a fierce current and pulled out to a chaotic sea.

Whenever Mercy asked what it had been like while he was locked up, Zeke just said it was nothing she needed to know
about, that it was the landscape of a bad dream—scorching in the summer and chilly in winter, gritty the whole fucking time. But
something
had happened to him, Mercy knew, and she always felt it was all her fault. If Zeke hadn’t stumbled into that clearing in the trees, he never would have half killed those two men, who in the end had walked away as free from guilt as newborn fawns, although physically scarred forever. She sighed. “Do you remember
anything
from the crash?”

“There was a bunch of metal meeting wood, tree branches whacking me when I got out, and shitloads of broken glass.”

“Didn’t you look in the ravine?”

Zeke shrugged. “I don’t know.” He ran a hand over his bruised face. “Jesus. Don’t look at me like that. I’ve seen enough in my time, okay?”

Mercy wriggled her legs to keep her blood going in the cold. “There must have been noises. Voices.
Something.
” Or maybe there hadn’t been. Maybe Zeke had been ahead of the bus all along. Zeke possessed a hunter’s walk, Mercy knew. Even in heavy boots or in the wettest of mud, he rolled heel to toe, heel to toe, his breath held tucked in his lungs for later. He owned the timing of a hunter as well—not the discipline of a warrior’s rush and charge but the wait-and-see of a stalker followed up with deadly aim. If there was something to be found, Zeke always uncovered it.

Up high above them, Mercy could hear the faint, rattling approach of a vehicle—probably Abel or one of his minions. Because of the complication of Gert’s bones, they kept returning. Men like that would last five minutes against her brother in the wild, Mercy thought, but if they caught him, it would be a different matter entirely. She leaned forward. “You know if you don’t fight this tooth and nail and come up with some proof
that you’re innocent, they’ll put you up for murder, and that will break my heart.”

For a moment her words almost had the intended effect. Zeke’s eyes watered, but all too soon he overcame the emotion, clearing his throat and leaning away from Mercy. He stood up, brushing off the seat of his dungarees. Frustrated, she joined him. One jail, she could see, had become much like another for her brother. Innocent, guilty—he didn’t seem to care anymore what he got labeled. He was both. He was neither.

Zeke regarded his sister. “So you aren’t fixing to leave.” It wasn’t a question.

Mercy put her hand in her pocket. Inside was the knife with the carved stag’s head. She didn’t feel like giving it back to Zeke just now, though. “I can’t. Hannah wouldn’t make it in the cold, with nowhere to go. We have no money, and wherever we go, there’d still be a warrant out for you.” But there was another reason, too, one that, once she acknowledged it, resounded in her like a bulging iron bell.
Someone
had to make things right—for Fergus and Hazel, for the Flytes, for her brother—and if Zeke wasn’t going to, then Mercy would.

“Then I’m not going anywhere either.”

This was exactly what Mercy had been afraid of—Zeke’s noble tendencies coming out again in exactly the wrong way. “Zeke, you have to leave. Only for a little while. It’s just dumb not to. You’ll get caught for sure.”

He grinned. “Not if I’m right smart.” And with a quick kiss on her cheek, he was gone. As he slipped back into the woods, Mercy felt a tight ball of grief forming in her chest. She’d heard plenty of variations of stupid applied to the Snow name over the years, but “right smart” was one thing none of them had ever gotten called. She was about to begin picking her way back up to
their clearing when she heard the rustle of Zeke behind her once again.

He hesitated and then spoke in a rush. “I did see one thing. Something in town, before the crash. I saw Cal McAllister talking to that blond girl who died. Outside the movie theater. She dropped her glove when she went in, and he took it. He was with another woman—someone who wasn’t his wife—and that girl, she saw the whole thing. It seemed like he was promising her something, but I don’t know what.”

Mercy’s mind swirled with this information. She almost didn’t feel Zeke’s lips as he touched them to her numb cheek. The sensation pulled her back to herself. “Wait.” She drew the knife out of her pocket. “You forgot this.” She eyed him sternly. “If you’re going to risk getting caught just to carve necklaces and trinkets for Hannah and leave them in the smokehouse, this blade does a better job.”

Zeke colored, then took the knife and folded it into his own pocket. In a quick blink, he was gone, leaving Mercy to head back toward daylight and the deputies, wondering what a man like Cal McAllister was doing holding on to the mitten of a dead girl, not to mention being seen with a lady who wasn’t his wife, and what a woman like June McAllister would do if she happened to find those things out.