Mercy Snow (34 page)

Zeke folded the pages and slipped them into his back pocket, his mind going into hunting mode, stalking and creeping, following the trail. Mercy had mentioned early on that Hazel was an orphan, raised nearby in an institution that had shut its doors for good some years earlier. It had to be the same place. What if, he mused, there was some kind of connection between Hazel and the McAllisters, and what if that connection was a blood one? It might explain why Hazel had chosen to linger for all these years on the outskirts of Titan Falls, an oddity with her sheep and her wool when the rest of the village was paper to its core. Maybe she really did love the quiet scoop of her valley and the art of husbandry, or perhaps she had reasons for staying that were more complicated than anyone knew.

Zeke cracked the smokehouse door and put an eye up to the slit, checking for an all-clear before he made for the trees again, but this time he had a solid destination in mind. He was many things, but he wasn’t a common thief. Ever since he’d stolen it, that damn ram had been weighing on his conscience. Now he thought he might finally have a way to pay it back.

A
s Nate drove down Devil’s Slide Road, Mercy once again considered his suggestion to run away together. He had some money coming to him, he’d said. How much could he mean? She had no intention of really going through with the scheme yet couldn’t help but think: What if they really did take Hannah and just flee? They could be a little family somewhere far away from the likes of rivers and trees. Hannah could finally go to a decent school. She could have a whole shelf of brand-new books to her name.

Suzie’s scarlet mitten lay on the seat next to Mercy, its frantic color an insult against the dull leather. Nate seemed to have aged in the hour since they’d found the mitten and closed up the cabin. He’d left Titan Falls a mere boy, Mercy thought, and here he was returning almost as embittered as she was. It was a transformation even the bus crash and the trauma of losing Suzie hadn’t accomplished, and Mercy was more than a little sorry for it. Even Nate’s voice seemed to have deepened, ripened by the shock of what he now knew. “Do you have any idea where your brother is?” he asked, grim.

Mercy stared down into the ravine as they sped along. “No.” Zeke was everywhere and nowhere all at once. That was the problem. He could be standing right behind the closest tree and you would never even know unless he chose to let you.

There was something else, too. Mercy wasn’t sure she wanted Zeke anywhere near Nate. Nate was nothing like those two men in the woods had been—nowhere even close—but Zeke wouldn’t have cause to know that. And if her brother found out that Mercy had a fantasy of running away with Nate… well, there was no telling what he might be tempted to do. “You can
take apart a whole,” he always said, referring to their bond, “but you can’t undo it.” Words Mercy used to find comforting but which chafed now. She turned to Nate. “I need to handle this my way. Give me an hour and I’ll see if I can track down any trace of him. If not, then we’ll go to Abel. Agreed?”

She held her breath. For a moment she was afraid Nate would keep driving into town, but when they arrived at the pull-off that led to the path to the clearing, he suddenly stepped on the brakes hard, throwing Mercy off balance. She gasped as the seat belt cut across her chest, knocking the wind out of her, and when she looked up, she saw June McAllister’s car pulled to the side of the road just ahead of them.

“Isn’t that your mother’s car?”

Nate’s voice was wooden. “It is.”

“What is she doing out here?”

“I don’t know.”

Mercy bit her thumbnail. “This is bad.” She pocketed the mitten.

“I know.” From the way Nate said it, Mercy knew that all bets with Zeke were off.

T
he clearing was too quiet. The RV door was open, Mercy found, but inside, it was empty. The place stank of stale upholstery and trash. Mercy blushed to have Nate see the conditions in which she lived. She wanted to reassure him that she knew perfectly well that garbage needed to go out and that food speckled with green was no good, but the prickle of unease she was feeling was too strong for her to worry about anyone’s good opinion now.

“Hannah?” she called, but there was no answer from the
sleeping loft. “Hannah?” Mercy climbed the ladder only to find the mattress empty.

“Follow me,” she barked, flying out of the RV to the smokehouse and flinging its door open, but it, too, was vacant. Hannah’s trinkets sat on their shelf—the poppet that Zeke had made her, a carved angel, the jar of coins, and an old coffee can dented to hell and scorched on its bottom. Mercy peered inside and then stuck her hand in. Nothing.

“Hannah?” she called again, louder this time.
Please don’t let June have her
, she prayed, but her stomach flip-flopped as her mind formed the words.

From down in the ravine, so faint she might not have heard it at all had it not been for her heightened concern, Mercy heard a cry. She cocked her head, willing it to come again, and it did, fainter this time, as if the sound were traveling away from her. That wasn’t good.

“Come on.” She ran out of the smokehouse, grabbed Nate, and headed into the forest, past Gert’s erstwhile grave, where the earth suddenly gave way and plunged down to the river. Mercy moved with a lithe surety, hopping between the trees as Nate slid and stumbled after her, trying to keep up.

Mercy heard her little sister before she saw her. “No!” Hannah was protesting. “Get
away
from me. I don’t want to go with you! Help!”

Mercy burst out of the trees to see June McAllister advancing toward Hannah, who was trapped between her and the river. She took a panicked step backward, her heel only a few inches away from the water now, but June kept coming toward the child. “If you don’t come with me, they’ll put you in a home,” June was pleading. “You don’t want that, do you?”

Mercy started running to save her little sister, but before she could reach her, Hannah turned and did something desperate.
She plunged into the river—knees, then hips, then finally her birdlike shoulders slipping under the water.

“Hannah!” Mercy screamed, hovering on the bank. Every cell in her body wanted to fish the child out of the river, but her feet were paralyzed.

“Get her!” June wheeled on Mercy. She seemed to be saying something about Abel arriving soon. “You need to get her out of here!” One of Hannah’s arms shot from the water, and then her head slipped under. This time Mercy didn’t think twice. She dived straight into the icy water.

Under the surface it was black and cold. Mercy had no breath and no blood anymore to move her limbs. Frantic, she tried to paddle her arms and legs, but they were numbed from the frosty water and wouldn’t comply. Her foot briefly slid along the bottom, but that dropped away again as the current pulled at her. Where was Hannah? Water flooded Mercy’s mouth, then spilled down her throat. Where was the bank?

Just then she felt a pair of arms squeezing her waist and tugging her to shore. Her head lolled forward as blackness closed in around her.
Nate
, she thought as she felt mud touch her cheek, but when she opened her eyes, she saw the hilt of a knife carved with a stag. Not Nate.

She looked up and saw Nate pulling Hannah from the river, her body limp, her lips blue, but her chest heaving, thank God. Mercy tried to say her sister’s name, as if uttering it would be enough to make her dry, but before she could, there was a loud gun crack, and then Mercy’s nerves exploded. She tried to pull Zeke’s arms away from her, to run back to Hannah and the river, but there was an almighty stinging weight in her chest, an anchor she couldn’t escape. She looked down and watched as a bloom of blood spread across the front of her with alarming
speed. Her vision tunneled, and she heard someone crying her name, but whether it was Nate or her brother, she couldn’t figure. She tried to sit up, but the pain grew too intense. There was so much she wanted to say and couldn’t. Her time for talking, it seemed, was over. Others would have to take up the thread. She arched back into the wet mud, her eyes rolling to Zeke, and he, as if he finally understood what she’d been trying to tell him all along, bent over her, his bony ribs making a cage over hers, heart to heart, his weight indeed the other half of her as she floated from this life to the next.

H
azel wouldn’t have gone and pulled a rifle on Zeke Snow, but Abel was a lawman with a jumpy trigger finger and a job to do. Hazel realized that nothing good was about to happen as soon as Abel had gotten Zeke in his sights, and in that regard she’d proved absolutely correct. Abel had missed and shot Mercy instead, and then all hell had broken as loose as a cave of rabid bats.

The minute she’d found the lamb and Hannah’s hat lying next to it, Hazel had deduced that something was fishy. The Snows were unfortunate and bad to the bone, but they were not wastrels. They ate what they took from the world, maybe not always fairly or entirely legally but regularly enough that their violence had a sound logic operating behind it. If Hazel knew anything, it was that no Snow would leave a perfectly good meal to bleed to death on the ground, and she could say that with confidence because she wouldn’t do it either.

She picked up the hat thinking that maybe Zeke had dropped it on his way back across her valley. He’d come to her door just after daybreak, and though her first impulse had been to fetch her
double-gauge, turn it on him, and advise him to start running, she’d chucked that idea like a hot coal as soon as he started talking.

Plenty of men could worm their way into a woman’s heart with a smooth line of chat, but in a paper town it was only words drawn in ink that carried weight. And the words Zeke had come to show her, Hazel quickly saw, were as heavy as they came. “Where did you say you found these?” she asked again, the documents from the Duncan Home for Girls clutched in her fist like a pair of winning lottery tickets. But they were even better than that, for lottery tickets only cemented the perfect happiness of your present and future, while these two chits of paper confirmed everything Hazel had ever suspected about her past.

Like hundreds of other poor souls up and down rivers in these parts, she’d been born and left an orphan, but unlike them she possessed a curious paper trail. During her last year at the Duncan Home for Girls, she’d assisted the head, Miss Blenheim, in the office, learning to type, take dictation, and file. It was during one of Hazel’s clandestine forays into the bowels of the Duncan Home’s records that she first found the list of annual donations from the Titan Paper Mill, all of them signed by Henry McAllister, all of them made in August, on the very same day as her admittance.

Hazel’s decision to settle in Titan Falls hadn’t been accidental—not by a long shot. She and Fergus had found their perfect valley, yes, but Hazel also couldn’t resist the chance to live directly in the shadow of the mill, right under the gaze of Henry McAllister himself, so proud with his haughty wife and young son, surrounded by shifting currents of gossip that might tell her who her mother had been.

She’d never wanted it to be Gert Snow, but now that Zeke had come to her and told her where he’d found the papers, she couldn’t deny her theory any longer. No wonder no one in town
had ever mourned Gert’s loss. She must have died soon after giving birth, maybe even by taking her own life. Had Hazel really been left by the river as an infant, she wondered, or was she perhaps stolen in the night and left somewhere Gert could never get her back? Pruitt must have figured it all out somehow when he took up residence out in the clearing—and Lord only knew by what nefarious means he’d gotten his hands on these papers—and that’s why Cal McAllister had never tried to run him out of town. Hazel lifted the wrinkled pads of her fingers up to her lips in careful thought. She looked at the ragged-haired boy standing in front of her, his eyes sunk too far in his head to be good for anyone, his nerves as jittery as hers. Hell, his nerves
were
hers. He was a Snow, and so, in a roundabout way, was she. They were kin, and kin could tell each other anything. “Did you cause that bus crash?”