Mercy Snow by Tiffany Baker Page B

been was a liar. “How did he seem when the boys turned up looking for him?” It was what Arlene had always called law enforcement.
The boys.
As if they were a band of friendly relations. Because once you knew one, you knew them all, Arlene liked to say.
    Hannah pursed her lips. “He didn’t stick around when he heard them coming. He just lit out, and so did I.” So maybe he
was
guilty, Mercy thought. Maybe he just hadn’t wanted to scare Hannah.
    Just then, however, Mercy spied Zeke’s jackknife laid on the dinette’s counter. Dented and worn, the handle was bone, carved in relief with the antlered head of a stag. Arlene had given it to him on his fifteenth birthday, and except for prison he was never parted from the piece. Mercy picked it up. “He didn’t take his knife.” She tightened her fingers around the bone, comforted by the sure way it fit her hand, hollow to hollow, curve to curve. She opened her palm and dropped the blade back onto the counter, then closed her eyes, picturing her brother running fast through the woods, his hat half pulled over his eyes. Underneath its brim those eyes would be alert as twin moons, and on his belt an empty space sat where the knife used to rest.
    When she opened her own eyes, Mercy saw that Hannah had taken off her sweater and that welts were blooming up and downher arms. She scratched at them without complaining, and this fact suddenly broke Mercy’s heart. She went to fetch a tin of salve that Arlene had taught her to make, a mixture of beeswax and chamomile, clean-smelling and soothing, and then took one of her sister’s needle-thin arms in her hand. So slight, but also surprisingly strong, like a green switch cut from a willow. “Let me see. Don’t scratch.”
    “It’s from the ghost that haunts around here,” Hannah said matter-of-factly as Mercy capped the salve. “She’s real mad about something.”
    “Don’t be silly, Hannah. That’s just another one of your stories.”
    Hannah, once she believed in something, was not easy to dissuade. “There is
so
a ghost. I told you. They found her bones tonight. She wants something from us, Mer. I just don’t know what.”
    Mercy twitched the curtains. “You keep out of that whole business. We’re not here to delve into ancient town history. It’s nothing to do with us. Anyway, they’re going to be up in our lives enough as it is, what with this accident and Zeke running off. Leave it.”
    Hannah pouted. “But Zeke didn’t
do
nothing. We get all the trouble,” she said, mournful and slow. “It just sticks to our sides.”
    Mercy almost burst out laughing. Hannah, with her tousled hair and huge eyes, sounded and looked like a kitten complaining in the rain, only things weren’t funny. Mercy was bone tired, damp, and there were precious few hours left until dawn. Tomorrow was Thanksgiving. Now,
that
was a joke. Mercy still had the pilfered page she’d ripped from Hazel’s cooking magazine folded in her pocket, but she saw now how stupid she’d been to think that she could ever re-create anything from that world in this one. She fisted her hands on her hips. “Let’s go to bed now.”
    Somewhere in the darkness, an owl let out a scream—a wet and panicked noise like a woman drowning. Mercy shut the curtains tighter on it. When the weather got good enough, she would have to remember to give them a good wash and an airing. She watched as Hannah began to climb up to the sleeping loft. “Why are you so sure Zeke’s innocent?”
    Hannah’s head wobbled on her frail neck as she echoed Mercy’s earlier thoughts. “He may be a box of fury, but he’s not a liar.”
    Mercy looked at the dented cans of corn pone and green beans lined on the kitchenette counter next to Zeke’s knife. When she and Zeke were little, anything could make him mad, but the one thing that could do it fastest was being blamed for something he didn’t do. Mercy remembered the time he got whipped for stealing eggs from a farmer’s