Mercy Snow (30 page)

“Fergus!” she cried, scooping up a napkin. “Fergus! I have a treat for you. I have something I want you to try.” If Mercy Snow could somehow manage to give her back her husband and son, Hazel figured, then maybe, just maybe, she could see to it in her soul to cancel out the price of a single gutless ram.

F
or a child who knew where to look, the world was chock-full of treasure. The smooth pebbles, stray pennies, and empty folds of foil gum wrappers that Hannah collected from ditches and plucked off curbsides weren’t worth a king’s ransom by any stretch of the imagination, but she loved her gewgaws nonetheless—maybe even all the more because no one else did.

Like a crow feathering its nest with bits of shine, she tucked all her finds on the shelf in the smokehouse, adding to her trove. There was the jar she’d filled with quartz and mica and another that contained pennies and coins. There were her books of fairy tales and myths stacked so carefully, their covers laminated in the clear plastic wrappers of libraries, their pages worn to the luxurious texture of kid. She wasn’t sure what she would ever do if she lost those. Around her neck she still wore the button on a string, which June had told her was really called a cuff link and which men apparently wore to hold together their shirtsleeves.

Lately instead of Hannah being the one to go out and find treasure, it had been coming to her. Over the past few weeks, she’d stumbled upon a variety of surprising objects tailored to catch her eye. There was a poppet sewn from skinned hide and
prettied with smudges of what looked like berry juice for eyes and a mouth. There was a bangle twisted out of birch bark and a crown made from a spray of brown-and-white-spotted feathers. Each time Hannah received another gift, she ran like a wild thing through the woods and down the ravine, calling her brother’s name, until she reached the bottom, where the deep bend of the river glittered and swirled. There his trail always ended, and she met with silence.

Hannah would crouch by the water and keen after Zeke. Nothing, not even curiosity, could compel her to tiptoe any closer, for just like Mercy, Hannah had a great fear of anything larger than a puddle. She would stand on the bank, breathing hard, and listen to the wind, the birds, and the sound of water wearing down rock, and always, just under all the usual chatter of the woods, there was another sound, too, a lower register of fury that only she could hear, and this voice knew her by name.

Hannah had seen Mercy fling Gert’s ashes somewhere else in the hollow, but she couldn’t remember the exact spot. She wanted to, though, for although Gert was returned once again to the earth, she wasn’t at peace. Far from it.

It was Gert, Hannah was sure, who was causing all the troubles that she and Mercy had been having lately. The more minor things were easy to shrug off. Mercy cut her finger on the lid of a creamed-corn can, and it wouldn’t heal, no matter what she did. Squirrels or mice had chewed through the hose on the propane tank, and they were out of duct tape to fix it. The sole on Hannah’s left boot was coming loose, letting in the wet and snow, but she knew better than to ask for a new pair.

Harder to ignore were the threats June McAllister had once again started sending their way. Those were more serious than a smashed plate or the windows in the RV sticking. Mercy said
June was mad about all the maple sap she’d given away to everyone in town.

“You’d think folks would be a bit more touched with gratitude,” she grumbled. “They should be standing up to the likes of June McAllister. Instead what’s that snake of a woman doing but plotting our downfall? I swear she’s more persistent than the devil.”

Hannah chewed her lip and said nothing. In the smokehouse she’d also hidden the spoils of her day with June in Berlin: the Cinderella watch, the blue comb, and the barrettes. Unlike Hannah’s other trinkets, these weren’t in plain sight. She’d stuffed them in the rusted old coffee can and tossed it in a shadowed corner under the three iron hooks, where even Mercy wouldn’t be tempted to snoop.

Hannah had lost count of the number of times the sheriff had been out to see them. He’d come to try to take possession of Gert’s ashes. He’d come to give them a citation for fire danger because of their leaky propane tank. Mercy had ripped that up in front of him, and he’d sighed and just written her a new one. He’d come to check Mercy’s license, and to inspect for flood risk, and, most ridiculously of all, because he said he’d been receiving complaints about noise.

It had gotten so bad that Hannah even considered going back to school, but before she could, a new visitor arrived. This one was a lady. She said she was from state social services, and she was most interested in speaking to Hannah, who had just hiked up from the bottom of the ravine and was about to burst into the clearing when she heard Mercy murmuring in an unusually subdued manner. Hannah had crept as close as she dared to the open trailer door and hidden herself behind a thick tree trunk.

“I understand your confusion,” Mercy was saying, “but there’s no children here. No, ma’am.”

Hannah couldn’t hear what the lady said back to her sister, but she didn’t like the frosty tone of her voice.

Mercy spoke a little louder, her clear vowels floating out into the thick of the forest. “I don’t know why there’s a girl enrolled in school by the name of Snow. It’s a coincidence, I’ll grant you that.”

The woman’s voice bubbled up again, cold and very sure of itself. Hannah closed her eyes and leaned her forehead against the tree trunk. She could guess what the woman was telling her sister.

When she opened her eyes, everything had gone quiet and she saw that the woman was retreating back up the little pathway to Devil’s Slide Road, where she must have left her car. Hannah waited an extra four heartbeats before she crept out from behind her tree and made her way to the camper.

Mercy wheeled on her with fury. “Where the holy hell have you been?” She put up the palm of her hand to stop Hannah before she could even answer. “Never you mind. It’s lucky your little behind wasn’t anywhere nearby. We’ve had an unpleasant visitor, and she shared a very interesting story.” Hannah worked her toe on the filthy carpet of the camper while Mercy eyeballed her. Her voice gentled. “Why don’t you tell me?”

Hannah broke down then and confessed everything—how school had not been the paradise she’d been imagining and how she’d been spending her days secreted in the library in town, or tucked up cozy in the wreck of a worker’s cabin she’d discovered behind the mill, or even, sometimes, right here in their own woods, climbing up and down the steep hillsides like a little goat until she grew too tired for words and snuck into the smokehouse for a nap on the rusty cot, being careful not to squeak the springs and give herself away.

Mercy sighed with relief that it wasn’t June who’d made good
on her threat to call social services after all. “No wonder you’re always so filthy!” Mercy exclaimed, drawing Hannah close to her and wrapping her thin arms around Hannah’s even skinnier shoulders. Tangled up together, the two of them were all sinew and bone, but the living kind, with the blood still running something fierce inside.

“You should have told me,” Mercy scolded, letting Hannah out of her embrace. “I wouldn’t have been mad, honest. But listen, Hannah, this isn’t over yet by a long shot. You need to be careful from now on. You need to make sure no one catches you, least of all that McAllister woman.”

Hannah’s heart thumped like a gong in her tiny chest, sending bad vibrations ringing all over her body. She blushed and hung her head, trying to conceal the shaking that had started up in her hands. “Okay.”

Mercy shooed her from the camper into the last of the hard season’s daylight. “Go on and fetch me some kindling. We’re going to have to make a campfire tonight. We’re out of propane again.”

Hannah scampered away, grateful to be set free but troubled by what she hadn’t told Mercy—specifically about her afternoon with June in Berlin and about what June had said to her when they parted, all that nonsense about canopy beds and cookies. Hannah crept into the smokehouse, found the coffee can, and gazed on the gifts June had bought for her. The watch no longer seemed so magical. Hannah saw that the white plastic wristband was grimy and already laced with tiny cracks, and the metal on the clasp wasn’t hefty silver, just some cheap shiny coating that was flaking off. Cinderella’s gloved arms were twisted awkwardly into inhuman angles. She looked like an octopus.

Sniffling, she took the items outside and tossed everything into the wilds of the trees. She couldn’t undo the afternoon she’d
spent with June, but she could throw it far away and leave it there cold. She took the can, a vessel she had no use for anymore, inside again and chucked it back under the hooks, which hung in the gloom and pointed at it, like teeth in the mouth of an all-seeing wolf.

M
ore than anything Hannah missed the library. She’d read all her books so many times she knew half the words by heart, but it wasn’t safe to go into town now, Mercy warned her time and time again.

“What if someone reports you? What if June gets her hands on you and this time she really does send social services out here?” Mercy crouched down to peer into Hannah’s eyes. “They might try to take you away, do you understand? They might say I’m not a fit guardian.” And when Hannah nodded mutely, Mercy sighed and ruffled her younger sister’s hair. “You’re a Snow, little monkey. We can’t help that, but we
can
help keep it that way.”

Hannah longed for the life in town. Even though she knew she couldn’t trust June, she still thrilled to remember her visit to the soda fountain in Berlin, where the nice blond waitress had scurried around, bringing them food. Stuck in the ravine all day, Hannah grew more skittish, jumping when she heard a chickadee break into song or the crack of an icicle thawing in the noon sun.

It was almost as if she had two sets of eyes—one for the ordinary world of laundry being hung out to dry and dishes stacked in the sink and another pair that saw wonders that most other folks overlooked: a bird’s nest wedged in the fork of a tree and lined with what looked like the papery wings of moths, a fox curled up in the snow with a bushy-tailed squirrel, an ice patch frozen on the river in the shape of a heart. They were messages
from Gert, Hannah knew.
Pay attention
, they said.
I’m trying to talk to you.

Today there was a set of very faint indentations in the mud—so light that Hannah had trouble seeing them. She wondered if they were even real. They wound from Gert’s old gravesite down through the trees and headed first toward the river, then away from it, and then back down again, growing softer all the while. Hannah was alone. Mercy had refused to say where she was going. “Never you mind,” she’d snapped when Hannah had asked, but it must have been somewhere good, because her cheeks had been all lit up like a Christmas tree and she’d twisted her hair into a pretty knot at the back of her neck and smudged some gloss on her lips from an old pot of color. After she left, Hannah had taken the rouge and put some on her own face and mouth, then inspected the results in a cracked hand mirror. It was no use. She still looked like what she was: a child who was knobby to a fault and skinny everywhere else.

In the empty bowl of the ravine, it was easy to feel as if the world had gone on ahead without her. As she followed the mysterious marks, she thought about Zeke disappearing the night after the accident and wondered what would happen if she vanished like that, too. Would Mercy know how to read the signs she left behind?

She paced back to the clearing, having lost the trail of prints and her interest in them. Maybe she’d just been seeing things. The geography of the Snow land was simple to a fault—up or down, in the trees or out of them, above the river or straight into it. It was the kind of landscape that could almost be a hundred better places but never quite was.

Inside the smokehouse Hannah was met with the usual gloom and meaty odor, but straightaway she felt that something was
different. She looked around, the hairs on her arms prickling. There was the rusty cot, angled just the same, and there were the three hooks, hanging like barbarous tongues, but the coffee can underneath them was gone. Shivering, Hannah stepped farther into the shadows and saw that someone had moved it over to the shelf with all her other riches. Her heart skipped a beat as she considered the implications of this. Had it been Mercy? If so, Hannah was glad she’d thrown away her loot, otherwise she’d be in for a whipping and a question-and-answer session when her sister got back.