Chapter 39
Carrie
He wasn’t at her wedding day. She pulled the flowers from her hair, desperate tears in her eyes, and under that same sickle moon, she went searching for him. She searched for him everywhere, all across the mountains, calling his name to the spring.
—Tabitha Morgan, July 19, 1929
I’m staying, and I want you to stay too.
The words thump to the rhythm of my heart as I walk, run, fly to the cottage, hoping he will be there. Now that I’ve spoken it out loud to Cora, saying it like a spell in that dusty, crooked little shop, I know it’s true. I want to stay. As soon as I said it, as soon as I visualized my artwork filling that space, I knew I wanted Matthieu to stay in Woodsmoke with me.
And just like a spell has been either broken or cast, the frost begins to thaw.
As I cross the field, the grass no longer crackles like splintered glass. It’s softening, rolling over and curling in a languorous wave as the sun spears great holes in the clouds, setting the world on fire. Spring has come and is shivering over everything, the landscape waking up with the kiss of heat and light. I laugh, breathless and dizzy, as memories tumble around in my head. Moments flash through my mind—the midnight picnic, his mouth on mine, paint flecking his features as we finished the last room. Each moment, each memory, turns into a molten haze and lights up the winter as I crash through the cottage door, calling his name.
“Matthieu! Matthieu, I have to tell you something! Where are you?”
I pull off one boot, hop on one foot as I pull off the other, then scurry through the lounge, into the kitchen—
He’s not here. He was here, just an hour or so ago. We woke up together, made coffee and toast. He didn’t mention going anywhere. I turn, rush back through the lounge, cross the hallway to thump up the staircase, one tread, three, five, and burst into the main bedroom.
“Matthieu?”
Silence. Deafening, ringing silence. I drop down in a sigh on the four-poster bed, allowing my heart rate to slow as the light trickles across me. I turn my head to the window, the panes filled with a soft glow, and wonder what it will be like to wake here each day with the sunlight streaming in. Every day I have woken up since returning, I’ve struggled in either gray light or complete, velvet darkness until I’m already up and ready. I draw in a breath, allowing it to fill every inch of my lungs, the words still beating like a promise through my veins. I want to say it aloud. I want to say it to him.
I want you to stay.
My phone rings downstairs, the distant tinny tune breaking into the warm fugue of my thoughts. I get up and move quickly down the stairs to find my coat and dig into the pocket for my phone. As I draw it out, it rings off before I can answer, and I’m sure, so sure, it was him, telling me he popped out, asking if I want him to pick up something for dinner—
But it’s a missed call from Cora and Howard’s house phone. Probably Cora phoning to remind me I’m expected at eleven tomorrow and to bring shortbread or cake. Or maybe it was Howard phoning to apologize, in his shuffling, roundabout way, for Cora’s sharp manner.
I walk into the lounge and sit next to the Wi-fi router I’ve had installed so that the call will be as clear as I can get it. I return the call, slumping in the armchair by the front window, knowing one of them will pick up on the third ring and not a moment before.
“Carrie,”
Howard answers on an exhaled breath. “Cora isn’t herself. I don’t know what to do. The doctor said this might happen, but I can’t get through to her . . .”
My whole being deflates. “What do you mean?”
He hesitates, as though he’s watching Carrie, wondering how much he can impart. “She just got back from town, and she’s—she’s saying the frost has broken. She just keeps repeating that. And she’s talking about her baby, she’s been going through each room, trying to find her baby . . . you know we never . . . Carrie?”
“I’m still here,” I say.
“Can you . . . come over? Talk to her? I can’t, I don’t know if she can even see me, hear me . . .”
I begin to move, casting one last regretful look around the empty cottage, as though I can summon an absent Matthieu from the walls. “I’ll be there in ten minutes.”
“Hurry.”
He hangs up abruptly, leaving me in stewing silence.
I try Matthieu’s number five times, and five times it rings out and out and out. On the drive over to Cora’s, I stare at the landscape, seeing only green and brown. The white has melted away, retreating for another year and leaving the mountains bald and bare. As though they are ready to be reborn.
I chew on my lip, drawing pinpricks of blood, and the copper taste swills in my mouth. I’m trying to pin down the details of our ice-skating trip in my memory. Did he speak to anyone? Did I collect the skates, or did he? All of Cora’s warnings worm their way into my thoughts. In each of my memories now, Matthieu seems transparent. Ghostly.
When I pull up at Cora and Howard’s in a spray of gravel and haste, Howard is already hobbling out, his creased face bent low, his chin tucked into his chest. For a handful of heartbeats, I don’t get out of the car but sit there, wondering. If the magic is real, has Cora done something? In her twisted way of trying to protect me, has she banished the frost from the mountain? What baby is she searching for?
I glance at my phone screen once more, as though I can conjure a message from the silence. But the fact is I haven’t seen Matthieu since yesterday. Haven’t heard from him at all today. And the shiver running through the fields finally reaches inside me, all the way into my bones. In this new spring light, I finally feel the cold of winter.
“Where is she?”
I ask, my voice strained and reedy as I step out of the car. “Where’s Cora?”
“Now, before you go after her—”
“Howard—”
“No, you have to listen.”
His mouth puckers. “You have to know. When I got back, she was talking about a baby crying, like she couldn’t even see me. Like I wasn’t there, or she was somewhere else entirely. She’s been searching everywhere for . . . for her baby. Our baby. But, Carrie, she’s never been with child. Not once. She never lost a baby, and she’s adamant it’s not Lillian or you. She won’t admit she’s just muddling things in her head . . .”
He takes a breath. “She’s not herself. She’s in one of those moods, talking faster and faster, and I’m worried for her, Carrie. All she wants, all she’s ever wanted, is to love you. I can’t, I cannot have her broken. Not again. Even if she shouldn’t have—”
“What did she do?”
“She—”
“Howard!”
Cora’s shriek rips through us. “Howard!”
His face drops, and he hobbles fast around the side of the house, throwing back the gate in his wake. I rush after him, heart in my mouth, wondering what I’ll find, wondering what Howard was finally about to admit—
Cora is holding Kep’s lead as the dog strains toward the chickens clucking and fighting to get into the henhouses, a mess of feathers and fright. Howard takes the lead from her, pulling it into his chest, and growls something I don’t catch as he pulls Kep into the house. He slams the kitchen door closed and turns, breathing heavily, and I notice for the first time the tremor in his hands.
“Cora. Never, ever . . .”
He swallows, catching his breath. “ . . . ever bring Kep out back. She’ll kill the chickens. You know that. You know that, woman!”
Cora blinks down at her hands, then at Howard, not even registering my presence. Her hair is a snarl, fanning out around her head, and her eyes are both wild and vacant. She’s wearing nothing but stockings on her feet, and I notice a food stain on the cardigan she’s wearing. I recall the conversation with the man in the hardware store when I first arrived, when I walked into the shop with the labyrinth of walkways between overstocked shelves with a list on my phone, picking up packets of screws and a hammer. He warned me about how she’s been, but I didn’t truly listen. He was talking about Cora, after all. She’s always been slightly out of step with the rest of the world.
I walk toward her now, taking her arm gently in mine, and guide her toward the house.
“I—I don’t remember . . . there was a baby crying, Kep was upset, we were going to find the baby, it was mine, I know it was . . .”
“It’s okay, Cora,”
I say, my heart breaking a little at how forlorn she seems, this woman who has always been like steel. How lost. “Let’s make some tea, have a biscuit, a sit-down—”
“Don’t tell Carrie. Whatever you do, you mustn’t tell her.”
Cora suddenly grips my arm, bony fingers stabbing into my sleeve. “She has to come back. It’s all wrong here without her. I made a mistake. A dreadful mistake that night. That working, in the moonlight . . . Ivy won’t forgive me. But—but—you can’t tell her.”
I turn cold.
“She’s not been herself for weeks,”
Howard says quietly. “Maybe even months, but I guess it’s been so gradual I didn’t . . . hadn’t . . . It’s never really around anyone else, but it’s like her mind wanders. I just thought she was daydreaming, just wandering . . . but today is different, Carrie. It’s like something inside her has snapped.”
Howard takes Cora’s other arm and guides her to the sofa. “But in the past week it’s gotten worse. She’s been babbling, not making sense. I didn’t know what to do, so I phoned the doctor. He’s coming here today after his appointments. He said to keep an eye on her, keep her safe. Not leave her alone at all.”
I swallow, stepping away from them both, a dark sense of foreboding sweeping over me. “I’ll make the tea.”
The clatter of the teaspoon jars me out of myself, and ten minutes of silence brings Cora back. Her gaze sharpens, her words turn more lucid, and I realize she’s been stuck between two worlds, with one foot in the present and one in the warm, coaxing pool of the past. Maybe in a dream of wanting a baby. Wanting one so much that it became real in her mind.
But it’s Howard who worries me. Howard, with his brown skin turning gray. He rubs at his left upper arm occasionally, a frown dimpling his features. He’s a little older than Cora, I know that much. She was a young bride when they married. In marrying Howard, she chose stability, a comfortable home, the town where she grew up. I heard stories about how he had his own farm, his own land, and the quiet confidence of a young man who knew how to handle life. Now they rent out the land next to the farm, keeping only the yard for the chickens and a field surrounding the house, left fallow. All I remember of Howard growing up was his calm, steady voice, his patience. How he never uttered a cross or unkind word.
I fuss with my mug as it grows cold in my hands, the glazed sides slipping against my fingers.
“Oh, Carrie,”
Cora suddenly says, eyes snapping to me. “Have you had any shortbread? Howard, get her some cake. You’re here for elevenses, aren’t you?”
As her eyes widen, darting between me and Howard, the ground tilts and there’s a sharp ringing in my ears. Howard is right. She thinks it’s the next day.
“Shortbread, yes . . .”
I nod, my eyes meeting Howard’s, both of us thinking the same thing.
“And would you get my housecoat? It’s a little cold today.”
She shivers and draws a blanket over her knees, but the heating is on full blast, and the house is warm against the slight chill coming off the mountains. I rise to my feet and slip into the hallway to find her housecoat, hanging on a hook by the door. When I turn, my gaze lingers on the scatter of sepia-toned photographs, seeking out the one that has always haunted me, that I am always drawn to.
The face of the trapper.
I stifle a gasp. I’ve been working with Matthieu for several months, but never noticed before now that the trapper looks so similar to him. The planes and angles of his face, the haunting quality of his eyes, the dark smudges underneath, the thick brows above. I take the photo off the wall, angling it to peer at the date in the top right corner. It doesn’t give the year, only the date. October 19.
The day after I returned . . . the day the frost formed over Woodsmoke.
I replace the frame on the wall, unease chilling me in this warm, quiet house. Returning to the lounge, I face Cora, after helping her into her housecoat, and take her papery hands in mine.
“Cora, I need to ask you . . . or I need to tell you. I can’t get ahold of Matthieu.”
I take a breath, avoiding the full force of her pinching stare. “The frost has thawed, and I’m worried that you were right. That the frost tale . . . is true.”
Her features soften, turning almost wistful. “Forget him, my love. He was real to you, but he was never meant to stay.”
I shake my head, not wanting to believe it. But for the first time, her warnings sting me, like hidden nettles, worrying away at me with their poison. But there all the same, on the edge of my mind, and now I can’t shake them off. “You think . . . you truly believe the mountains . . .”
I draw in a breath. Continuing quietly, I start again. “If the old stories are true, then Matthieu . . .”
“Has disappeared as the frost has thawed, yes,”
she says. “Don’t go chasing after him up those mountains. He’s not coming back.”
“But what does the frost tale say?”
I ask, desperately searching for some reason, any reason, to make sense of this foreboding, this terrible knowing that he might not . . . that he isn’t . . .
Cora leans forward suddenly, grasping my hands in hers. She presses with surprising strength, and her sharp bones grind into my knuckles. My gaze darts to her face, and I find her eyes are clear and unyielding. “He’s a spirit. A spirit of the mountains and the lingering magic in this wild and ancient place. Perhaps guided by those known as the fair folk, the ones leading people to stray from the paths. Maybe he was here once, maybe he did lose his brother. But, Carrie, you do not meddle with those who are lost. Promise me you won’t go looking for him.”
“Cora—”
“You must promise,”
she says, an anxious edge to her tone. “Spirits, fair folk, curses, and bargains . . . they are not to be trifled with.”
I swallow, tearing my eyes from hers. “I promise.”