Chapter 10 #3
"Is it plausible you'd take four pieces of scrap out of a corner and not look at the back of all of them?" Tom said. "Kenz, I picked up eleven pieces of birch bark this autumn and I don't know what's on the back of any of them."
"Fair."
"Fact four," Kindra said. "She gave that specific piece to you and not to me or the kids, and she did it after drawing his map on it."
"Why that one?" Tom asked.
Nell's voice was very small.
"It was the biggest," she said. "Yours needed to be the biggest because it had the most on it."
The table was quiet.
"That's the answer," McKenzie said. "That's actually the answer. She drew the map with the most on it on the biggest piece and the biggest piece happened to be the one with writing on it."
"Or," Oliver said, and then stopped.
"Say it," Tom said.
"Or he put it in the pile on purpose and knew she'd take it."
Everyone looked at him.
"How would he know that?" Kindra said.
"How did he know about the stone wall in the draw?" Oliver said. "How did he know Dad would never stand in the dooryard? He's been right about everything for three months."
Tom put both hands flat on the table.
"All right," he said. "Here's the honest version, and I'm going to say it in front of Nell because she's already living inside it."
"Okay," Nell said.
"There are exactly three explanations and all three of them are possible."
He held up a finger.
"One. Coincidence. He wrote something on a scrap in October, threw it in a corner, and a kid picked it up. This is the boring explanation and boring explanations are right about eighty percent of the time."
Second finger.
"Two. He wrote it about her and left it where she'd find it, because he knew she was going to run and he wanted her to arrive carrying something that would make us doubt her. This costs him one sentence and it buys him a week of us watching a child instead of watching the treeline."
Third finger.
"Three. It's true."
Nell said, "What does compass mean?"
The question landed in the middle of the table like a dropped plate.
"You don't know the word?"
"I know it's a thing for finding north. I don't know what it means when it's about a person."
Kindra said, "It means something that shows you the direction to go."
Nell frowned.
"That doesn't make sense," she said. "I never showed him anything."
"Nell," Tom said. "When you were at the ranch, did he ever ask you questions?"
"Everybody asks kids questions."
"Did he?"
She thought.
"He asked me what I'd do," she said slowly.
"About things. He'd be drawing on the board and he'd say, Mouse, if you were down there and you heard a noise in the dark, what would you do. And I'd say I'd go up the hill and hide in the rocks. And he'd say why not the house, and I'd say because a house has one door."
Nobody breathed.
"How many times?" Tom said.
"I don't know. A lot. All autumn."
"Nell." Kindra's voice was very careful. "Did he ask you about running away?"
"Once."
"What did he ask?"
"He said, if you ran, which way would you go."
"And what did you say?"
"I said I wouldn't tell him that."
Tom closed his eyes.
"And what did he say?"
"He laughed," Nell said, "and he said that's why you're the only one worth asking."
Kindra got up and went to the stove and stood there a long time.
"He wasn't using her as a spy," she said finally, not turning around. "He was using her as a model."
"Say it plainly."
"He had a problem he couldn't solve. There's a family on the other side of the mountain who thinks like prey and does everything right, and he can't get at them."
She turned around. "So he found the only person in his house who had ever actually been prey, and he asked her what she'd do. Every day. For four months."
"And she told him."
"She told him what she would do. Which is what we would do. Which is what anybody smart and frightened would do." Kindra's eyes were bright and hard. "That's the compass. She's not pointing at us. She's pointing at the way a cornered person thinks, and he's been reading her like an instrument."
Nell had gone completely rigid.
"I told him about the rocks," she said.
"Nell."
"He asked me what I'd do and I said I'd go up the hill and hide in the rocks, and then he came back and said there's a stone wall in the draw." Her voice cracked all the way through for the first time since she arrived. "That's me. That's from me. I did that."
"No," Tom said.
"I did."
"Nell, listen."
"I told him!"
And then she did the thing she had not done through a frozen foot and a twenty two minute rewarming and thirteen days in a stranger's house, which was to come apart completely, sobbing so hard she could not get air, sitting on a bench in a cabin with a wooden spoon in her fist.
Kindra got to her first and got her off the bench and onto the floor and held her the way you hold a person who is not going to stop for a while.
It took eleven minutes.
Tom sat at the table and did not say anything and did not move, because he had learned something about this child in thirteen days, which was that she had never once been allowed to do this and that interrupting it would be a crime.
When it slowed down, Kindra said, "Can I say something now?"
Nell nodded against her shoulder.
"He asked an eight year old what she would do if she were scared," Kindra said. "And she told him the truth, because she was eight, and because he fed her, and because in four months he was the only adult who ever asked her a question and waited for the answer."
"That's not."
"That is exactly what happened and it is not a thing you did. It's a thing he did to you." Kindra pushed the hair back off her face. "Nell, he is a very smart man who used a child as a tool. That's on him. Every single ounce of it is on him."
"But he knows about the rocks."
"He knows about the rocks," Tom said, "and he's known since November, and Nell, we already knew he knew."
Her head came up.
"What?"
"You told me yourself, thirteen days ago at two in the morning at this table. You said he'd walked the whole meadow looking for it and couldn't see it, and that he said he'd lose four men coming at stone uphill in the dark."
Tom leaned forward. "That information is the single reason I stopped lying awake in November. You didn't hand him the stand. You handed us the reason he won't come at it."
"That's not the same."
"It is exactly the same, and here's the part you're not seeing." Tom picked up the bark. "You just gave me four places where a man stands. Four. He's been reading you for four months, and you've been reading him back the whole time, and he doesn't know it."
Nell wiped her face with the heel of her hand.
"He doesn't know it," she said.
"How could he? You're the compass. Nobody checks whether the compass is watching them."
McKenzie said, quietly, "That's a hell of a thing, Dad."
"It's the best thing that's happened to us since October."
Nell sat up on the floor.
"He's going to come," she said.
"I know."
"No, I mean I know when." She was shaking but her voice had steadied. "He told me. Not on purpose. He told everybody at the table in November because he wanted the men to stop asking."
Tom sat very still.
"Go ahead."
"He said he wouldn't go at your place until the stuff went hard."
"Until the what went hard?"
"The snow. He said in December it's soft and deep and a man breaks trail and he's wrecked before he gets there, and in March it's rotten and you fall through."
Nell was reciting again, word for word, the way she did.
"But he said there's about three weeks in the middle where it goes to crust. Where it freezes at night and holds a man's weight in the morning and you can walk on top of it."
"Late January," Tom said.
"He said the last week of January and the first two of February."
"Because he can move men fast over crust."
"He said sixteen men on crust is nine miles in five hours and sixteen men in soft snow is nine miles in two days and half of them useless when they get there."
Tom got up and walked to the window and stood with his hand on the shutter latch.
"That's it," he said. "That's the whole thing. That's why nothing's happened since October and that's why twelve fires and a soap bar and a ripped cache and nothing else."
"He's been waiting for weather," Kindra said.
"He's been waiting for weather, and he's been spending the wait on making us jump, because every time we jump we spend a day."
"How long do we have?"
Tom looked at the calendar he had scratched into the log beside the door, a mark for every day since the first of October.
"It's the twenty fifth of December," he said. "If he comes the last week of January, we've got about thirty two days."
The table was quiet.
Then Oliver said, "Thirty two days is a lot."
Everybody looked at him.
"What?" he said. "It is. We built the whole stand in four days. We moved six caches in a week. We got three cords in nine days after the shed burned." He had gone red but he kept going. "Thirty two days is more time than we've had for anything all year."
Tom stared at his son.
"Say that again."
"Thirty two days is a lot."
"Oliver, that's the second time this winter you've said the thing I needed to hear and couldn't see."
"Is it?"
"It is, and I want you to notice that it keeps being you, and I want you to start expecting it of yourself." Tom came back to the table. "Kindra. Get the ash."
"It's Christmas."
"It's five o'clock on Christmas and there's stew and we're going to eat it, and then at seven we're going to start, and we've got thirty two days and I know exactly what we're doing with them."
"You do?"
"For the first time since September," Tom said, "I know exactly what we're doing."
They ate the stew.
It was as good as the first one and nobody talked for four minutes, which was becoming a family tradition, and Sofie fell asleep at the table with her cheek on the wood the way she had in September and Kindra carried her up.
Nell ate two bowls, slowly, with her wooden spoon, and did not put the spoon down between bites.