Tomorrow morning, Ruthie promised herself. If her mother wasn’t home by then, she’d call the police for sure. First thing.
They made a stew with beef from the chest freezer in the basement—Ruthie had been relieved to see there was enough meat in there to last them for months. There were still plenty of potatoes and onions down in the root cellar, too.
But they couldn’t go on like this formonths, could they? As the day crept by, Ruthie allowed herself to wonder what would actually happen to them if Mom never returned. There was nearly two hundred dollars in the coffee can in the basement. Not much, but they wouldn’t need much. There was no mortgage on the house—really, they just had to pay for food, utilities, gas for the truck, supplies for the chickens. Ruthie knew she could run the egg business on her own. She had always resented all the work she was forced to do in their huge vegetable garden, but she knew they could get a lot of food out of it—she and Fawn knew how to start seeds in the spring, how to construct a trellis for the peas, when to harvest garlic. Mom had taught both girls to bake bread and can tomatoes and beans. Ruthie could get a part-time job in town. They’d get by. If they had to, they’d find a way.
But they wouldn’t have to, would they? Surely this would all be over soon.
The stew simmered on the back of the woodstove, filling the house with a delicious, comforting smell that made Ruthie miss her mother even more.
By midafternoon, Fawn’s fever was back. Ruthie gave her more Tylenol and set her up on the couch with her dolls and coloring books.
“How you feeling, Little Deer?”
“Fine,” Fawn said, face flushed, hair damp. She had a funny, glazed look in her eyes.
“You just take it easy, okay? No going outside. Try to drink lots, too.”
“Mmm-hmm,” Fawn said, feeding a sip of imaginary medicine to Mimi, who also had a fever.
“Mimi should take it easy, too,” Ruthie said, making the doll a little bed out of a pillow, with a kitchen towel for a blanket. This pleased Fawn, who insisted that Mimi needed a pillow, too, and Ruthie used a ball of her mom’s fluffiest yarn to make her one.
Outside, the wind whistled through the trees, pushing the snow in great drifts. Ruthie curled up in the big recliner under one of her mother’s bright afghans and readVisitors from the Other Side. Sara’s book gave Ruthie the creeps, big-time. She kept looking over her shoulder, sure she saw movement in the shadows. What bothered her most was the idea of little sleeper Gertie in what was now her mother’s bedroom closet. The same closet her mother had nailed shut.
Toward the end of the book, Sara revealed the origin of the hidey-holes Fawn and Ruthie had found:
As a child, I discovered and created dozens of hiding places by loosening bricks and floorboards, making secret compartments behind the walls. There are some hiding places that I am convinced no one could ever find.
Ruthie glanced over at her sister. She was on the couch, bandaging her doll’s leg. Poor Mimi, first a fever, now a broken leg.
“I told you not to go into the woods,” Fawn whispered to Mimi. “Bad things happen to little girls who go into the woods.”
Fawn looked up, saw Ruthie watching her. “Will you play with me?” Fawn’s eyes reflected the firelight from the glass-fronted woodstove.
“Sure,” she said, setting down the book. “What do you want to play?”
“Hide-and-seek.”
“Can’t we play something else? Dolls or cards or something?”
Fawn shook her head, then lifted up Mimi, who shook her head as well, the scratched button eyes looking right at Ruthie.
“Mimi will only play hide-and-seek. She has a new favorite place to hide.”
“But last time, I couldn’t find you.”
“So maybe try harder,” Fawn said, grinning impishly.
“Okay,” Ruthie sighed, “but if I say I give up, you have to come out. Deal?”
“Deal,” Fawn said.
Ruthie covered her eyes and counted out loud. “One, two, three…” she shouted, listening closely, trying to hear which way her sister’s footsteps went. Down the hall.
She thought of Sara and Gertie playing hide-and-seek here in this house. How good little Gertie was at hiding. And Sara must have been good at hiding, too. At hiding papers, at least.
“Ten, eleven, twelve…”
She heard the closet door in the front hall open, then close. But Fawn did stuff like this to fake her out, to lead her the wrong way. She was a clever kid. Too clever sometimes.
