The Winter People

Katherine arrowed through to the next photo. “It’s a map of some kind,” she said. Crudely drawn, it showed a house, fields, and a path through the woods that wound up a hill and to the Devil’s Hand. All around the Devil’s Hand was tiny, illegible script. Below, taking up the bottom half of the paper, was another drawing: a network of lines and circles that could have depicted anything—a waterway or paths, perhaps? This, too, was marked with small, impossible-to-read notations.

 

“Let me see,” Candace said, grabbing the camera from her. “It’s the map showing the way to the portal! It has to be. Can you make it bigger?”

 

Katherine shook her head. “That’s as big as it gets on the camera. If you have a computer, we could enlarge it, even print things out.”

 

“We don’t have a computer,” Fawn reported. “Mom doesn’t believe in them.”

 

“Jesus Christ. Of course she doesn’t,” Candace muttered. She squinted at the display. “I can’t make out the writing,” Candace said, “but it looks like the portal is up at the Devil’s Hand. But what’s this at the bottom?”

 

“Some kind of blowup or detail of where the actual portal is, maybe?” Ruthie suggested.

 

“What other pictures are on here?”

 

Katherine showed her the button that advanced the pictures.

 

“Looks like more diary pages,” Candace said, squinting down at the screen. “Look at this! There’s even a picture of the original letter Auntie wrote Sara about the sleepers. But where’d Gary find them?”

 

“May I?” Katherine asked, taking the camera back. She scanned through the photos. The little black metal box and tintypes were in the background of some of the pictures Gary had taken of the journal entries.

 

“Two weeks before he was killed, Gary bought a box of old papers and photos at an antique store in the Adirondacks. He collected old photos—he was kind of obsessed with them. I guess it just so happened that pages of the diary were mixed in with the photos he bought that weekend.”

 

“And you never saw them? He never mentioned it?” Ruthie asked.

 

“No,” Katherine said, her mind spinning. “But he started to act odd. Like he was keeping some kind of secret. He was out of the house a lot and had lame excuses for where he’d been. I think …” Her voice broke off. “We had a son. Austin. He died two years ago. He was six.”

 

Her hands shook. She held the camera, Gary’s camera, tighter.

 

She remembered Gary holding her while she wept one night, saying, “I’d do anything to have him back. Sell my soul, make a deal with the Devil, but we aren’t given chances like that, Katherine. It’s not the way the world works.”

 

But what if he was wrong?

 

Katherine imagined it, Gary discovering these pages, probably thinking they were pure bullshit at first. But then, as he got more deeply into it and did research on Sara Harrison Shea, maybe he started to wonder, What if …?

 

That’s what brought him to Vermont. The idea, the hope, that maybe, just maybe, there was a way to bring Austin back.

 

Sure enough, the next photos on the camera showed the farmhouse, barn, and fields. Then the woods. Close-ups of a path, of gnarled old apple trees, of rocks jutting up into the sky.

 

“He was here,” Ruthie said. “That’s the Devil’s Hand. It’s up on the hill behind our house.”

 

Gary had been here. Had visited this place on the last day of his life. She flipped through the pictures of the rocks quickly.

 

“Wait,” Candace said. “Go back.”

 

She arrowed back through.

 

“There,” Candace said, jabbing her finger at the screen on the back of the camera. “What does that look like to you?”

 

Katherine stared down. It was a close-up of one of the large finger-shaped rocks that made up the hand formation. Gary had taken the photo in low light, and it was hard to make out what she was seeing.

 

“There’s something there,” Ruthie said, pointing to what appeared to be a squarish hole just along the left edge of the finger.

 

“It’s an opening of some kind,” Candace agreed. “A cave, maybe? That map at the bottom of the page, it could be tunnels, right?”

 

“There’s no cave up there,” Ruthie said, moving closer for a better look. “Not that I ever heard of.”

 

The next set of four pictures were dark and blurry.

 

“Jesus, did he go down into it?” Candace said. “Is that why the pictures are so dark?”

 

“I can’t tell,” Katherine said. “Like I said, with a computer I could play around and enhance them so we could get a better look.”

 

“We don’t need a computer,” Candace announced. “Our next move is pretty obvious, isn’t it?”

 

They all looked at her, waiting. She still held the gun, but it was down by her side.

 

“We’re going into the woods. If there’s some kind of secret door or cave or something back there, we’ve got to check it out. Who knows, maybe that’s where your mother is; if not, maybe we’ll find a clue about where to find her. And if we can find her, there’s a chance she’s still got all the missing pages—not just the ones Tom and I found, but maybe the ones from Gary as well. Then we’ll all get what we want, right? I’ll get the pages, you girls just may find your mom there, and Katherine will find out what Gary did here in West Hall.”

 

“I don’t think—” Ruthie started to say.

 

Candace cut her off. “You don’t have a choice. We’re all going.”