Chapter 9 #2
He sat on the edge of the loft with his back to the room and Oliver and Sofie on either side of him and McKenzie refusing to leave the ladder, and below them Kindra Thorn got a starved eight year old out of four layers of somebody else's clothes and spent twenty minutes finding out exactly what had
happened to her.
Tom heard the water move. He heard Kindra say things in a voice he had heard her use on the children when they were babies and had never heard her use on anything else.
He did not hear Nell say anything at all.
After a while Kindra called up, "Tom. Bring me the soap and the yarrow and the tallow."
He brought them down without looking and went back up.
At eight o'clock Kindra came up the ladder and sat on the top rung and put her face in her hands, and Tom put an arm around her, and she shook for about a minute and then stopped and wiped her face with her wrist.
"Tell me," he said.
"Not in front of them."
"Kindra, they live here."
She lifted her head and looked at McKenzie, who was twelve, and at Oliver, who was ten, and at Sofie, who was asleep against Tom's leg.
"All right," she said. "The short version, and then I'm never saying it again."
"Okay."
"She's got scars on both wrists, front and back, in a pattern that's from something tied on and left there a long time."
Kindra's voice was flat and steady and cost her everything.
"She's got a burn on her left shoulder blade the size of a bottle cap. She's got old breaks in two fingers that healed crooked because nobody set them."
"What about."
"No," Kindra said. "Not that. I looked because I had to and I'd know, and no."
Tom let out a breath he had been holding since four in the afternoon.
"Thank God."
"Don't thank anybody. She's eight. What was done to her is enough."
"Did she say who?"
"She said, and I'm quoting, the first ones." Kindra's jaw was tight. "Which means there's been more than one set."
McKenzie said, from the ladder, "How much does she weigh?"
"Forty one pounds."
"That's Sofie."
"That's less than Sofie."
Nobody said anything.
They fed her at nine and Kindra did it properly, which took a discipline Tom did not think he possessed and which he would not have gotten right on his own.
"Broth," Kindra said. "One cup. Warm, not hot, and she sips it over twenty minutes."
Nell looked at the cup and then at the pot on the stove.
"That's all?"
"For now."
"There's a whole pot."
"There is."
"I'm not going to be sick. I can eat. I've gone longer and eaten more."
"Nell." Kindra crouched in front of her. "I believe you. And here's what I know that you don't, and I'm telling you because you're going to have to agree to this and I'm not going to just do it to you."
"Okay."
"When a body's been starving for a long time, it changes how it runs. It stops storing things. And if you put a big meal in it all at once, the body panics and tries to switch back over, and it pulls salts and minerals out of the blood so fast that the heart can't keep time."
"And then what?"
"And then people who survived months of starving die three days after somebody feeds them."
Nell thought about this.
"That happened to Ama," she said.
Everyone went still.
"Who's Ama?"
"She was with me before. At the first place. She got out and some people found her and gave her a whole plate and she was fine and then she wasn't fine." Nell's face did not move. "She died in a truck."
"That's what that was," Kindra said gently.
"Okay." Nell picked up the cup. "Then I'll do it slow."
She sipped broth for twenty minutes and said nothing and her hands shook the whole time.
Then Kindra gave her a second cup at ten, with a spoon of rendered fat stirred into it, and four ounces of soft boiled elk at eleven, and that was all she got in the first four hours.
"Tomorrow she gets six small meals, not three," Kindra said. "Broth, fat, and salt, and we go up slow over ten days. Fat before starch, always. And I want her drinking constantly."
"Ten days seems long."
"Ten days is fast. The books say two weeks and the books are written by people who had a hospital."
At eleven thirty they put her in the loft with Sofie, because Sofie was six and unthreatening and because Kindra wanted a warm body next to her all night.
Nell fell asleep in about forty seconds, in the middle of a sentence, the way a person does when the thing that has been holding them upright finally lets go.
Tom sat downstairs with Kindra and McKenzie and Oliver, and nobody went to bed.
"I have to say the thing," Tom said.
"I know you do."
"I'm going to say it badly."
"Say it anyway."
"Nothing about tonight changes anything."
He said it looking at the table. "She is a child, and she is in our house, and I would not put her back out there for the cellar and everything in it. And also we now have a person in this house who spent an unknown number of months with men who put a burn on her back, and who came here on purpose,
and who knew where our caches were."
"You think she's a plant," Oliver said.
"I think if I were Wallace Wingman and I wanted into this house, that's exactly what I'd send."
"Dad, that's."
"I know what it is."
"She's got a dead toe," McKenzie said.
"I know that too, and I'll tell you the truth: a man who raked a dog with a garden rake and stacked eleven noisemakers in a pot would absolutely let a child's foot freeze if it got him a door."
The room was quiet.
"So what do we do?" Kindra said. "Because I want to hear you say it before I decide how angry to be."
"We do everything," Tom said. "We feed her, we fix her foot, we treat her like she's ours, and not one single person in this family says one word about it in front of her, ever, because if I'm wrong about her then suspicion is the worst thing we could possibly do to a child who's been through that."
"And?"
"And we change the caches."
Kindra let out a breath.
"All six?"
"Four of them. She found number four herself, and number four's the drop and it stays. But she's been on this property. She got up that draw in the dark and found a tree."
Tom rubbed his eyes. "So we move one, two, three and five in the next week, and we do it at night, and nobody talks about it in the house."
"That's a lot of hauling."
"It's four nights."
"And six?" McKenzie said. "Why not six?"
"Because six is under the chicken run and it is not possible to move a hundred pounds out of a chicken run without every person in this house knowing about it," Tom said. "So six stays and six is our real one, and from tonight, nobody says the word chicken in this cabin for any reason."
"That's genuinely clever," Kindra said.
"That's genuinely awful and I hate all of it."
"Both things are true."
At one in the morning Tom took the watch and sat by the east window with the GP100 on the sill.
At two he heard the ladder.
It was Nell. She came down it backward, one foot, hopping on the good one, refusing to put weight on the wrapped one, and it took her four minutes and she did not ask for help and Tom did not offer, because he had a feeling that offering would have been the wrong thing.
She got to the bottom and sat down on the second rung.
"You're awake," she said.
"I'm on watch."
"There's watches?"
"Two hour shifts. Nine to eleven, eleven to one, one to three."
She nodded slowly.
"That's good," she said. "They don't do that."
Tom kept looking at the window.
"Who doesn't?"
"The ones at the ranch." Nell pulled the blanket up. "They put one man out and he goes to sleep by two every single night. Every night. I used to watch him do it."
Tom's hands went very still on the sill.
"Nell," he said carefully. "I'm not going to ask you anything tonight. You got here about ten hours ago and your foot's ruined and I'm not going to sit you down and interrogate you at two in the morning."
"I know."
"So if you want to go back up, go back up."
"I want to tell you now," she said, "because tomorrow I'll be less brave."
Tom turned around.
She was sitting on the second rung of a ladder in a cabin in Montana with her knees pulled up and her face absolutely empty of anything, and she said:
"There's four buildings on the other side of the saddle and there's nineteen people in them and four of them are kids like me. Two boys and a girl and a baby, and the baby's not going to make it past January."
"Nell."
"And the man with the hatchet's name is Wallace and he isn't there right now, because he went down the valley eleven days ago to talk to the Warden about you."
Tom sat completely motionless.
"About us."
"About your house." She looked at him with her flat empty eyes. "They can't take it. They've been trying since October and they can't, and Wallace has been walking here every week and coming back saying the same thing."
"What thing?"
"That there's a man in that cabin who thinks like a trapper," Nell said, "and that the only way to get him is to make him come out."
Tom did not answer for a long moment, and when he did he kept his voice exactly as flat as hers.
"Nell, I'm going to stop you."
"Why?"
"Because you're eight, and it's two in the morning, and you're telling me the single most important information I've received in six months, and if I let you spill all of it right now you're going to wake up tomorrow feeling like you gave something away in the dark."
He turned his chair to face her properly.
"So here's what we'll do. I'll get your mother. I mean Kindra."
Something flickered across the girl's face and went away.
"She's asleep."
"She's not. She hasn't been asleep since four o'clock." He raised his voice slightly. "Kindra."
"Coming," Kindra said, from the bed, instantly.
They sat the three of them at the table with one lamp shuttered to a slit, and Kindra put a cup of warm broth in front of Nell and one in front of Tom.
"Rules," Kindra said. "You can stop any time, for any reason, and you don't have to explain why. You can say I don't want to answer that and nobody will ask again. And if you say something tonight and tomorrow you decide it wasn't true, you can change it and nobody will hold it against you."
Nell looked at her.