Chapter 9
Nobody moved.
Four words, in a child's voice, and every adult instinct Tom had went in two directions at once and tore straight down the middle.
"Kenz," he said. "Go. Now."
"Dad, that's a kid."
"That's four words in a kid's voice at forty feet in the dark and I cannot see the treeline. Go."
She went.
They were out the woodshed gap in fifty one seconds, McKenzie carrying Sofie, Oliver with the .22, Shyla going with them because Sofie had her by the collar and would not let go.
Kindra stayed, because Kindra had never once in eleven years done what she was told in a moment like this and Tom had stopped expecting it.
"Beretta," he said.
"I've got it."
"North corner. Do not come out from behind that log. If I go down, you don't come to me, you go up the draw."
"Tom."
"Say it back."
"If you go down I go up the draw."
"Good."
He put himself at the woodpile with the GP100 and the rick between his body and the yard, and he did not call out for a full minute.
He used the minute.
The snow had stopped at noon and the light was going blue, and the meadow was fourteen inches of unbroken white all the way to the black wall of timber two hundred yards out.
And there was one track line in it.
One.
It came out of the timber at the northeast corner, the hard way, through the deep stuff, not along the packed river trail, and it wandered.
It wandered badly. It looped twice. In one place it went four feet off line and came back, which is what a person does when they are walking with their eyes closed for a few steps at a time.
Tom looked at that track line and felt something in his chest that he had to physically push down.
"Who's out there?" he called.
Silence.
Then: "It's just me."
"That's not what I asked."
"I don't have a name that would mean anything."
Tom and Kindra looked at each other across forty feet of yard.
"That's a strange answer," Tom called.
"It's the true one."
"How old are you?"
"Eight. I think. I might be nine now."
"Are you alone?"
"Yes."
"If somebody's got a hand on your shoulder and is telling you what to say, you say the word river."
A pause.
"Nobody's got a hand on my shoulder."
"Say the word river."
"River," the voice said. "But that doesn't prove anything, because if somebody was telling me what to say he would have told me to say it."
Kindra made a small sound.
Tom closed his eyes for one second.
"That's true," he called. "That's completely true. Come to the fence."
"I can't."
"Why not?"
"Because I can't get up."
Tom went out.
He went out the correct way anyway, along the inside of the hedge and then wide, keeping the fence between himself and the northeast timber, taking eleven minutes to cover forty feet, and Kindra covered the treeline the whole time and never took her eyes off it.
He came up on her from the side.
She was on her knees in the snow eleven feet from the garden fence with her hands out from her sides, palms forward, as high as she could hold them, which was not very high.
She was small. Not a small eight. A starved eight, which is a different thing, with a head that looked too heavy for the neck under it.
Her coat was a man's canvas jacket with the sleeves cut off at the wrist and tied, and under it were four or five layers of things that had been other things. Her hair had been long once and had been cut off with a knife in a way that suggested she had done it herself.
Her left foot was in a hide wrapper, laced tight and correct, with the fur turned in.
McKenzie's wrapper.
The right one was gone. There was a wad of rag on that foot, frozen, and it had come apart at the heel.
"I'm not going to hurt you," Tom said.
"I know."
"How do you know?"
"You built me a fire," she said, "and then you walked away uphill so I could see you going."
Tom knelt in the snow four feet from her.
"What's your name?"
"I told you. I don't have one that means anything." Her voice had no self pity in it at all, which was the worst part. "The men called me Mouse. Before that I had a real one but it's been a long time since anybody said it and I'd rather not hear it in a stranger's mouth."
"Then what do you want to be called?"
She looked at him.
"You pick," she said. "But not Mouse."
"How about I don't pick," Tom said. "How about you tell me the real one, and I say it back to you once, and then we see how it sounds."
She was quiet a long moment.
"Nell," she said.
"Nell."
Her face did something complicated.
"Yeah," she said. "Okay."
"Nell, I'm going to pick you up now and carry you inside, and there's going to be four people in there looking at you like you're a bomb, and they won't be wrong to. Can you handle that?"
"Are they going to feed me?"
"Yes."
"Then I can handle anything."
He put his arms under her and she weighed nothing.
That was the thing he would tell Kindra later, in the dark, when he could not sleep. Not her face and not the foot. That she weighed nothing at all, less than Sofie, and Sofie was six.
He carried her to the porch and Kindra came off the north corner with the Beretta still up and looked past them both at the timber.
"One track line," Tom said.
"I counted it."
"Wandering."
"I saw that too."
"I'm bringing her in."
"I know you are." Kindra lowered the pistol. "Put her by the stove. Not on it, by it, and not too close, and I mean that medically."
They did it right and they did it fast and Tom was grateful for the next forty minutes because forty minutes of procedure is the only thing that keeps a person from falling apart.
"Frostbite rules," Kindra said, kneeling, cutting the rag off the right foot with her good scissors. "And I'm saying them out loud so everybody in this house learns them tonight."
McKenzie and Oliver had come down from the stand and were standing against the far wall with Sofie between them, all three of them staring.
"One. You do not rub. Ever." Kindra peeled the last of it away. "Ice crystals have formed inside those cells. If you rub, you drag the crystals through the tissue and you shred it. Half the fingers lost in the history of this country got lost to somebody trying to help by rubbing them."
The foot came clear.
It was white to the arch and the four smaller toes were the color of candle wax, and the big toe was gray at the tip with a violet ring behind it.
Nell looked down at it with total detachment.
"It doesn't hurt," she said.
"I know it doesn't. That's the problem."
Kindra did not look up. "Two. You do not use dry heat. Not the stove, not a fire, not a hot rock. She can't feel that foot, which means she can't tell you when it's burning, and I have seen a picture of what happens when somebody warms a frozen foot on a woodstove and I'm not describing it."
"Then what?"
"Water. Warm, not hot. Body temperature and a little over. If you can hold your own hand in it comfortably for a full minute, it's right, and if it makes you flinch at all it's too hot."
She had Tom fill the small tub and test it twice on his own wrist.
"Three, and this is the one nobody knows."
Kindra sat back on her heels. "You never rewarm a frozen foot if there's any chance it's going to freeze again. Never. Freeze, thaw, freeze does four times the damage of staying frozen. If we were out in the timber right now I would leave that foot exactly as it is and walk her out on it."
"Why?"
"Because frozen tissue is dead tissue that hasn't found out yet. Thawed and refrozen tissue is a wound that keeps happening." Kindra looked up. "We're inside. It's not going to refreeze. So we thaw it."
They put the foot in the water and Nell watched it with great interest and no reaction whatsoever.
Then, at about ninety seconds, it started.
"Oh," she said.
"Here it comes."
"Oh."
"It's going to be bad, honey. It's going to be very bad for about twenty minutes and it's going to be worse than anything that's happened to you today, and it means it's working."
"That's stupid."
"It's completely stupid and it's how bodies are."
It took her at three minutes and it took her hard.
She did not scream. Tom noticed that and it told him more about the last eight months of her life than anything she said all night.
She got very rigid and she made a low continuous sound through her teeth and her hands twisted in the blanket, and she did not scream, because somewhere in the last year she had learned that screaming brought something worse.
McKenzie crossed the room.
She did not ask. She sat down on the floor next to the tub and took the girl's hand, and Nell looked at her with shock, and then held on hard enough to leave marks.
"Squeeze it," McKenzie said. "Squeeze as hard as you want, you can't hurt me."
Twenty two minutes.
Then the color came back in a rush, red and then dark red, and the big toe stayed gray at the tip and did not come back at all.
Kindra looked at it for a long time.
"How bad?" Tom said quietly.
"The four small ones will be all right. They'll blister and they'll be agony for a week and she'll keep them."
"And the big one?"
"That's a deep one and it's a superficial one on top and I don't know yet, and neither would a doctor at this stage."
Kindra dried the foot by patting, no friction anywhere.
"Two weeks before anybody can say. If it goes black to a clean line and stays dry and doesn't smell, it'll take care of itself and she'll lose the tip and nothing more."
"And if it doesn't stay dry?"
"Then we have a conversation I don't want to have."
She put loose dry dressing between every toe, cotton from a torn shirt, and wrapped the foot without any pressure at all.
"No boot on that foot for a month," she said. "No weight on it for two weeks. She gets carried."
"I can walk," Nell said.
"You can, and you won't."
Then Kindra sat back and looked at the rest of her and her face changed.
"Tom," she said. "Take the kids up."
"Kindra."
"Take them up now."
He took them up.