“No,” Ruthie told her. “It’s past saving. Don’t touch it, okay?”
“Come on, I think we’re about halfway there,” Candace said, tucking the gun away, turning her headlamp back to the path before them. If they looked carefully, they could make out the barely discernible impressions of tracks from Candace’s trip down the hill, hours ago. The hillside was much steeper now, and the walk was more of a climb. Katherine thought of photos she’d seen of climbers on Mount Everest, all strung together with rope so that they would not lose one another, so that no one would fall and be left behind. They began to trudge on, Candace picking up the pace, the girls struggling to keep up. But Katherine slowed down, stopping at the place where the fox had been. Fortunately, there was no rope binding her to the others, and they did not seem to notice she was no longer right behind them. She bent down, took off her glove, and touched the white snowshoe hare. It was still warm, its fur soft.
Quickly she scooped the rabbit up, surprised by how very light it was. Then she slid Gary’s backpack off her shoulders, carefully laid the animal inside, and zipped it up tight.
She ran to catch up with the others, heart pounding, ears buzzing.
The rabbit was small. It couldn’t be too hard, she imagined, to feel for its ribs, open it up, and remove its heart.
Ruthie
“It’s got to be here somewhere,” Candace said as she scrabbled around at the base of the Devil’s Hand.
“I can’t believe how big the rocks are,” Katherine said, looking up at them. “The tallest one’s got to be twenty feet at least. They don’t look that big in the pictures.”
“The Devil must be a giant,” Fawn said, clinging tight to Mimi. Mimi was still swaddled in the blanket that held the gun.
It had taken them nearly forty-five minutes to climb the hill. Since they’d arrived at the top, Candace had spent at least ten minutes digging randomly with almost spasmodic movements. “The hole could be beneath any of the five rocks,” she said. “They all look the same. What are you all waiting for? Start digging!”
The snow was falling steadily, and the rocks were blanketed in a thick white glove. Candace was pawing through the snow with her mittened hands, pushing and pulling any smaller rocks aside.
“Let me see that,” Ruthie said, tucking the flashlight into her coat pocket and reaching to take the camera from Katherine, who was staring down at the back display. Ruthie saw that Katherine had been studying one of those close-up photos of the instructions for creating sleepers.
Ruthie fast-forwarded to the photo of the opening at the base of the rock. The picture was taken back in October, in daylight, and now it was pitch-dark, and everything was covered with snow. Ruthie studied the grain, shape, and shadows of the rock in the photo, then shone her flashlight on the rocks before her.
Candace was wrong. They weren’t all the same.
“I think it’s the biggest one,” Ruthie said. “The middle finger. See here, the way it seems like it’s kind of leaning to the left compared to the one beside it in the picture? And look at the angle he took it from. He must have been standing right over there, on the left side. There’s the big maple in the background.” She pointed at the tree, now shrouded in snow.
She handed the camera back to Katherine and took off her snowshoes. She used one as a shovel to pull snow back from the base of the middle-finger rock. Soon she’d uncovered a rock about two feet in diameter, and many smaller ones that rested against the bottom of the finger. She gave the big rock a hard shove, but it held tight, cemented to the ground by ice and snow.
“Give me a hand,” she said to Candace. Together, they pried and pushed the rock. At last, it budged, then rolled away, as if they were pushing the bottom ball of a snowman.
Katherine shone her light down on a small hole leading into the ground at the base of the large finger stone. “This is it! The entrance!”
The opening looked narrow, barely big enough for an adult to squeeze through. If Ruthie had come across it out hiking, she would have thought it was the den of a small animal—a fox or a skunk maybe—and passed it by.
Ruthie clicked on her flashlight and shone it into the narrow hole. The darkness seemed to eat up the beam of her light, and she couldn’t see how far back the tunnel went. “Are we sure this goes anywhere?” she asked, doubtful. What she was really thinking was, There’s no way in hell I’m climbing in there.