Idiot. What do you think you’re doing?
She buttoned her coat and jumped out of the Jeep, her feet sinking in the snow. She’d try to get a look in the windows first; then, if she still thought this might be Alice’s house, she’d knock on the door and say she was having car trouble and ask to use a phone. She’d tell them she didn’t have a cell. She took the cell phone out of her purse and stuck it in the Jeep’s glove compartment, happy with herself for thinking of this detail. Then she locked the car with a mechanical chirp and headed back up the road toward the driveway.
No cars passed. There was no sound at all. The muffled silence of the snowy landscape seemed so unnatural, as if the world had been draped in cotton. The only things she heard were the wind and the sound of her own footsteps squeaking through the fluffy snow.
She pressed on, wanting—needing—to get a little closer. To see the house where a woman with a braid and two girls kept a garden. The house where Sara Harrison Shea had called her Gertie back to her.
Katherine trudged down the middle of the driveway, feet pushing through the snow like awkward canoes. The details of the house suddenly emerged from the darkness. This was it! She recognized it from the photos—a small farmhouse with three windows downstairs and three upstairs. A few brick steps leading up to the front door, right in the center of the house. Woodsmoke poured out of the chimney.
She left the driveway and cut across the edge of the yard, staying in shadows. She had a lovely adrenaline buzz—here she was, doing something crazy, something almost criminal—trespassing, spying like a Peeping Tom.
Just one quick look, she promised herself. She imagined peeking in the window, immediately seeing the woman with the braid. Then she’d go straight to the door with her story of car trouble, find out if the woman’s name was Alice.
She ran the last few yards, bent over, keeping herself low and under the windows. She got beneath the middle window, the one to the right of the front door, and caught her breath.
Slowly, cautiously, she lifted her head, half imagining she’d look inside and even see Sara in a rocking chair, little Gertie on her lap.
What she saw instead made her clap her hand over her mouth, bite down on the thin, salty leather of her glove.
She was looking into a large living room with wide plank floors and throw rugs in muted earth tones. Against the wall was a large brick hearth with a woodstove burning.
A woman stood in front of it. She had blond hair and wore an ivory-colored sweater. In her right hand, she held a gun. She was waving the weapon at a small girl in red overalls who was clinging to an old rag doll. An older, dark-haired girl stood beside the little girl, her eyes frantic as she nodded in answer to whatever the woman had just said. The girls from the photograph—the ones helping their mother in the garden.
Katherine ducked back down, reached in her purse for her cell phone to call 911, but then remembered she’d left it back in the car.
“Shit!” she hissed in a low whisper.
She couldn’t leave these girls. Not like this. She had to do something.
She had the sudden sense that this was why she’d been led here, why she’d found Sara’s book in Gary’s toolbox and discovered the photos in the book she’d bought at the store. Why she’d gotten out of the Jeep in the dark blizzard against her better judgment. Some force had drawn her to this place at this time so she could, for the first time in her life maybe, do something truly useful. Something truly great.
She thought of the weeks when she’d sat by Austin’s side—holding his hand in the hospital bed, feeding him bites of Jell-O, telling him silly stories—of how powerless she’d been, unable to save him, to stop this terrible thing that was coming. And then there was Gary. Crushed in a car wreck, and she hadn’t even been there—hadn’t even been given the chance to try to save him. (Slow down, she might have said. The roads are icy.)
Some things are out of our control. Sometimes terrible things happen and there’s not a damn thing we can do to stop them.
But here she was, given a chance to make a difference.
She was going to save those girls.
Ruthie
“Our mom disappeared on New Year’s Day. She made dinner, put my sister to bed, made a cup of tea. When I got home later that night, she was gone,” Ruthie said.
Candace nodded, slipping the gun back into the holster now that the girls were cooperating.
“Do you know what happened to her?” Fawn asked, looking up at Candace, her huge brown eyes as pleading as Ruthie had ever seen them.
Candace ran a hand through her hair. “I’m not exactly sure, but I might have an idea.”
“Please,” Ruthie said. “If you know anything, tell us.”