Chapter 24
Ruthie
It was an uneventful morning, which put Ruthie on edge—everything felt normal except for the absence of her mother, looming over everything like a hazy film, giving the whole day a blurry, unreal feeling and a bitter saccharine aftertaste.
It was Saturday, and though Ruthie thought about going to the farmers’ market to sell eggs in her mother’s place, she decided dealing with all the questions she’d get wasn’t worth the hundred or so bucks she’d make. Buzz was working at his uncle’s shop and wouldn’t get off until late.
The girls spent the morning puttering around the house, peering anxiously out the windows, Ruthie willing the phone to ring.
Ruthie washed the dishes. Swept the floor.
Fed the chickens and collected eggs. Kept the fire in the woodstove burning.
She did all the things Mom would do, and did them as Mommishly as she knew how.
Fawn followed Ruthie from room to room, never letting her big sister out of her sight.
She hovered right outside the bathroom door when Ruthie went in to pee.
“I’m not going anywhere, you know,” Ruthie told her.
Fawn shrugged, but continued to shadow Ruthie’s every move.
At least a dozen times, Ruthie decided she was going to call the police, but every time, she stopped herself at the last minute.
What if her mother and father were involved somehow with the O’Rourkes’ disappearance?
What if that crazy lady in Connecticut had already called the police about Ruthie showing up on her doorstep?
And she would have to tell them about the gun, right?
There was no way it was licensed or legal.
And Fawn—they would definitely take Fawn away, wouldn’t they?
No way they’d leave Fawn in this house with illegal guns and no one but Ruthie to care for her.
And still she clung to the idea that her mother would just show up, with a perfectly good explanation—“I’m so sorry I worried you, but …
”—and God, she would be furious if Ruthie had caved and called the police.
Tomorrow morning, Ruthie promised herself. If her mother wasn’t home by then, she’d call the police for sure. First thing.
They made a stew with beef from the chest freezer in the basement—Ruthie had been relieved to see there was enough meat in there to last them for months. There were still plenty of potatoes and onions down in the root cellar, too.
But they couldn’t go on like this for months, could they?
As the day crept by, Ruthie allowed herself to wonder what would actually happen to them if Mom never returned.
There was nearly two hundred dollars in the coffee can in the basement.
Not much, but they wouldn’t need much. There was no mortgage on the house—really, they just had to pay for food, utilities, gas for the truck, supplies for the chickens.
Ruthie knew she could run the egg business on her own.
She had always resented all the work she was forced to do in their huge vegetable garden, but she knew they could get a lot of food out of it—she and Fawn knew how to start seeds in the spring, how to construct a trellis for the peas, when to harvest garlic.
Mom had taught both girls to bake bread and can tomatoes and beans.
Ruthie could get a part-time job in town.
They’d get by. If they had to, they’d find a way.
But they wouldn’t have to, would they? Surely this would all be over soon.
The stew simmered on the back of the woodstove, filling the house with a delicious, comforting smell that made Ruthie miss her mother even more.
By midafternoon, Fawn’s fever was back. Ruthie gave her more Tylenol and set her up on the couch with her dolls and coloring books.
“How you feeling, Little Deer?”
“Fine,” Fawn said, face flushed, hair damp. She had a funny, glazed look in her eyes.
“You just take it easy, okay? No going outside. Try to drink lots, too.”
“Mmm-hmm,” Fawn said, feeding a sip of imaginary medicine to Mimi, who also had a fever.
“Mimi should take it easy, too,” Ruthie said, making the doll a little bed out of a pillow, with a kitchen towel for a blanket. This pleased Fawn, who insisted that Mimi needed a pillow, too, and Ruthie used a ball of her mom’s fluffiest yarn to make her one.
Outside, the wind whistled through the trees, pushing the snow in great drifts.
Ruthie curled up in the big recliner under one of her mother’s bright afghans and read Visitors from the Other Side.
Sara’s book gave Ruthie the creeps, big-time.
She kept looking over her shoulder, sure she saw movement in the shadows.
What bothered her most was the idea of little sleeper Gertie in what was now her mother’s bedroom closet.
The same closet her mother had nailed shut.
Toward the end of the book, Sara revealed the origin of the hidey-holes Fawn and Ruthie had found:
As a child, I discovered and created dozens of hiding places by loosening bricks and floorboards, making secret compartments behind the walls. There are some hiding places that I am convinced no one could ever find.
Ruthie glanced over at her sister. She was on the couch, bandaging her doll’s leg. Poor Mimi, first a fever, now a broken leg.
“I told you not to go into the woods,” Fawn whispered to Mimi. “Bad things happen to little girls who go into the woods.”
Fawn looked up, saw Ruthie watching her. “Will you play with me?” Fawn’s eyes reflected the firelight from the glass-fronted woodstove.
“Sure,” she said, setting down the book. “What do you want to play?”
“Hide-and-seek.”
“Can’t we play something else? Dolls or cards or something?”
Fawn shook her head, then lifted up Mimi, who shook her head as well, the scratched button eyes looking right at Ruthie.
“Mimi will only play hide-and-seek. She has a new favorite place to hide.”
“But last time, I couldn’t find you.”
“So maybe try harder,” Fawn said, grinning impishly.
“Okay,” Ruthie sighed, “but if I say I give up, you have to come out. Deal?”
“Deal,” Fawn said.
Ruthie covered her eyes and counted out loud. “One, two, three …” she shouted, listening closely, trying to hear which way her sister’s footsteps went. Down the hall.
She thought of Sara and Gertie playing hide-and-seek here in this house. How good little Gertie was at hiding. And Sara must have been good at hiding, too. At hiding papers, at least.
“Ten, eleven, twelve …”
She heard the closet door in the front hall open, then close. But Fawn did stuff like this to fake her out, to lead her the wrong way. She was a clever kid. Too clever sometimes.
“Eighteen, nineteen, twenty. Ready or not, here I come!”
She rose from the couch, listening hard. The fire popped. The cat thumped down the stairs, coming to see what all the noise was about.
“Where’d she go, Roscoe? Did you see her?”
The cat rubbed against Ruthie’s leg, gave her a m-m-mur-r-r-l?
Trick or not, she went right for the hall closet, pulled the door open, pushed aside the jackets and coats, and pawed through the jumbled pile of boots and shoes on the floor.
“Hmm, not in the hall closet,” she said loudly.
She turned and looked out the window in the front door.
It had gotten dark. She flipped on the light, saw that it was snowing heavily.
Ruthie hadn’t heard a forecast. Keeping track of the weather had always been her mother’s job.
Ruthie relied on her each morning to know how cold it was going to be, if it would rain or snow.
“Where, oh, where can my lost little lamb be?” she asked, moving into the living room, the office, then the kitchen.
She went to the downstairs bathroom and flipped on the light.
The pink tiles glowed as Ruthie pulled back the shower curtain to find the old claw-foot tub empty except for her mother’s chamomile shampoo and a lonely yellow rubber duck.
“Not here,” she said, making her way to the stairs, tired of the game already. She’d do a quick once-over of the upstairs, then call it off.
She looked halfheartedly through her room, Fawn’s room, the upstairs bathroom, announcing her location, wondering aloud where Fawn could be.
Finally, she entered her mother’s room, though she doubted Fawn would ever hide there.
Fawn wasn’t under the bed. The only other place in there to hide was the closet.
She stood before the door, hesitant. Stupidly, she knocked.
Nothing knocked back. She yanked open the door and was grateful to find it empty.
“Fawn?” she called out. “I give up!” She listened. Nothing. She went from room to room again, calling, then headed back down the stairs.
There it was again: the familiar panic. Fawn was missing. Really missing this time. Ruthie should never have agreed to play hide-and-seek again. Not in this house, where Sara Harrison Shea had called her little dead daughter back to her.
“Fawn!” she called, voice edgier now. “If you don’t come out right now, I’m never going to play hide-and-seek with you again!”
She was down in the office. Her father had kept it so tidy, the old mahogany desk clear, books carefully arranged on shelves, nothing on the floor but a woven rug.
Now that it was her mother’s realm, chaos reigned.
Papers, books, knitting patterns, poultry catalogues, and mail were piled in stacks on the desk and floor; there were tote bags full of wool and knitting projects in various stages of completion.
Ruthie sat down in the chair and reached into one of the bags to pull out the hat her mother had been making when Ruthie last saw her.
It was New Year’s Day, and she was sitting on the couch knitting a hat on circular needles, using chunky yarn in bright colors: fuchsia, lemon yellow, and neon blue.
“Where are you off to?” she’d asked when she saw Ruthie head into the hall and pull on her parka. She didn’t stop knitting, the needles clinking away in her hands while her eyes were on Ruthie.