When we returned home, Amelia insisted on putting me to bed and offered to go find Martin.
“No need,” I told her. “I’ll just rest awhile. I’m feeling much better, really.”
As soon as she left, I jumped out of bed and searched the house again, more frantically than ever.
I kept hearing Mrs. Willard’s words: This thing that you are doing is not right. She doesn’t like it at all.
What had I done wrong? How had I scared my Gertie off?
Unsure of what else to do, I put on my coat and walked through the woods to the old well, but I found no trace of her. It was a miserable sight, looking down into the darkness at the bottom of that circle of stone, like peering down the throat of a hungry giant.
The whole time I was up on the hill, I felt as if I were being watched. As if the trees and rocks themselves had eyes. As if the branches were thin fingers scrabbling against my face, waiting to grab hold of me.
“Gertie?” I cried out from the center of a small clearing just behind the Devil’s Hand. “Where are you?”
The great rocks that formed the hand cast shadows over the snow—long, thin shadows that turned the fingers into claws. And there I was, in the middle of them, trapped in their grip.
I heard branches breaking. Footsteps behind me. I held my breath and turned around, arms open wide to catch her, to hold her tight. “Gertie?”
Martin stepped into the clearing. He had a funny worried look in his eyes. He was carrying his rifle. “Gertie’s gone, Sara. You simply must accept that.” He moved toward me slowly, like I was an animal he was afraid of startling.
“Did you follow me?” I asked, unable to keep the venom from my voice. How dare he?
“I’m worried about you, Sara. You have not been well. You’re not … yourself.”
I laughed. “Not myself?” I tried to recall the Sara I’d been weeks ago, when Gertie was alive. It was true, I had become a different person. The world had shifted. My eyes were open now.
“Let’s go back home, get you into bed. I’ll get Lucius to come this evening to take a look at you.”
He put his arm around me, and I flinched. I flinched at my own husband’s touch. He gripped tightly and led me, as if I were an uncooperative horse.
We said nothing as we walked past the Devil’s Hand, climbed back down the hill, through the trees and orchard, across the field, and back home. He led me upstairs, to our bedroom.
“I know you haven’t been sleeping well at night. A nice rest will do you good,” Martin said, his hand clamped tight around my arm. “Perhaps your trip into town for lunch with Amelia was too much for you.”
As we entered the bedroom, we saw it.
Martin froze, his fingers digging into my arm. I gasped, childish and fearful.
The closet door stood open. There were piles of clothing strewn all around the room, as if a great storm had passed through. A closer look showed that it was all Martin’s clothing. And it had been torn apart, each garment sliced and ruined. Martin’s eyes were huge, furious, and disbelieving. I watched as he leaned down to pick up the sleeve of his good white Sunday shirt, clutching it so hard his hand trembled.
“Why would you do this, Sara?”
And I saw what I had become to him: a madwoman, capable of furious destruction.
“It wasn’t me,” I cried. My eyes searched the closet, finding it empty.
I turned toward the bed, thinking to look under it. There, amid the remains of Martin’s ruined overalls, was a note written in childish scrawl:
Ask Him What He berryed in the field.
I picked up the paper, holding it gently, as if it were a wounded butterfly. Martin snatched it from my hand and read it, his face bone white.
“The ring,” he stammered, looking at me over the top of the paper. “Just like you told me to.”
But there was a little twitch I’d seen before. The same barely recognizable flinch in the muscles around his left eye that he gave after Christmas, when he promised he’d buried the ring back in the field. And here it was again, that little involuntary quiver that told me he was lying.
Katherine