“Fawn’s right,” Ruthie said. “She wouldn’t. I can believe that if she did have the pages she might try to sell them, but I think if she was doing it, she’d be doing it for us.” Ruthie thought of her mother’s promise to help with college next year—was this her big plan, to take the one thing of value she had and sell it so Ruthie could go to the school of her choice?
“Maybe you’re right.” Candace shrugged. “Or maybe your mother tried to sell them and something went wrong. I must admit that, when you showed up at my house and told me she’d disappeared, I was…surprised,” Candace said, plucking at a strand of her hair. “Alice was very committed to staying here, to raising you as her own child. Both of your parents were. I promised them I’d stay away, would let them raise you, and would never tell you about your real parents. We all decided that was what was best. There was nowhere else for you to go. My husband—my ex-husband—he didn’t want an extra mouth to feed, and he just wanted it all to goaway. He never…approved of how close I was with Tommy, I see that now. And James and Alice wanted to stay on here, to watch over the hill and make sure whatever creature it was they believed lived there wouldn’t harm anyone again. They were…caught up in the mythology of it all. In Sara and the sleepers. They felt like they’d been led here—like they were part of something bigger than themselves.”
Ruthie thought of all the warnings her parents had given her over the years:Stay out of the woods. It’s dangerous up there.
Was there something up there in those woods?
She remembered the uneasy feeling of being watched she so often had out there; finding her father dead with the ax clenched in his hands; being carried down the hill when she was a little girl, told it was all a bad dream.
Her thoughts were interrupted by a crashing sound from somewhere in the back of the house. Candace pulled out her gun and jumped up so fast she nearly knocked the table over.
“Where’d it come from?” Candace asked, eyes huge and frightened. She held the gun in both hands, pointing up toward the ceiling.
“The bathroom, I think,” Ruthie answered.
Candace started to leave the kitchen, then turned back and looked at the girls, who were still in their seats. “Come on,” she insisted. “We stay together.”
They raced to the bathroom and found the window broken, glass and melting snow covering the tile floor. There were drops of blood splattered here and there. Fawn grabbed Ruthie’s hand, held it in a bone-crushing grip, her own small hand hot and surprisingly strong. Her other arm was wrapped tightly around Mimi—still swaddled in the blanket, gun tucked inside.
“Stay behind me,” Candace hissed. Slowly, she followed the puddles and drips of blood down the hall and into the living room. Ruthie kept Fawn behind her, listening hard for sounds, but only hearing her own heart pounding. As irrational as it was, one thought kept bubbling its way to the top of her frazzled brain:It’s the monster. The monster is real, and it’s here, in the house.
“Hold it right there,” Candace said, raising her gun.
A woman stood, bent over the coffee table, holding in herhands the Nikon the girls had found in the backpack earlier. She was tall, thin, and very pale, dressed in paint-splattered jeans and an expensive-looking coat. Blood leaked from the thin black glove on her right hand.
“Where did you get this?” she asked, holding out the camera. Her voice was cracked and broken, and her eyes were full of tears. “Where did you get this?”
Katherine
“Put the camera down,” the blond woman said, her gun aimed right at Katherine. The two girls stood behind her, looking just as frightened as they had when she’d seen them through the window with the woman who was holding the gun.
As soon as she spotted the familiar bag and contents on the coffee table, she’d forgotten everything else—the gun, the girls in danger she was supposed to be saving.
“Is this someone you know?” the blond woman asked the girls.
“No!” said the older girl. “I’ve never seen her before.”
“Maybe she’s a sleeper,” the smaller girl said, clutching a beat-up rag doll tight.
What was Katherine supposed to say? How could she begin to explain her presence here?
But no. They were the ones with the explaining to do. They had Gary’s backpack.
Ask them, Gary whispered in her ear.Ask them how they got it.
She clenched the Nikon tighter and waved it in front of them. “This was my husband’s. This is all his.”
“Put the camera down and step away from the bag,” ordered the blond woman, gesturing with her gun. “I’m not going to tell you again.”
“My husband’s name was Gary,” Katherine said to the girls as she set the camera back down on the coffee table, her voice cracking and desperate. “Did you know him? Did he come to your house, maybe?” Both girls shook their heads.
“He’s dead,” Katherine said, voice shaking. “He was here, in West Hall. Then, on his way home, there was an accident, the roads were icy and…” She was unable to go on, her thoughts jumbled, the pain and loss fresh and raw all over again as she looked down at Gary’s things.
“I’m sorry,” the older girl said.
The woman with the gun looked over at the older girl. “What’s the story with the camera stuff, Ruthie?”
“Seriously, I don’t know,” she said. “We just found it.”
