Near the Bone by Christina Henry (ebook reader color screen txt) 📗

or brings it up on snowmobiles and then he takes the stuff into town and distributes it to dealers who take it elsewhere. Because that is a lot of shit, right there. Way more than he could sell in town, unless everyone in town is an addict. Although I guess it is possible, because there is a meth crisis and everything. There are some towns where like 90 percent of the population is addicted to meth.”

Mattie didn’t understand most of this. She sort of understood the concept of illegal drugs, because she remembered posters at school admonishing the students—“DON’T DO DRUGS”—but she’d been far too young to know what drugs really were, or what they did to people.

She remembered then that there were days when she heard a noise like an engine, coming near to the cabin, and whenever this happened she wasn’t allowed to go outside for anything, not even to use the outhouse. But William would go out carrying his rucksack, and when he returned he would go into the bedroom and shut the door.

“William sells this?” she said. “And that’s how he gets all of his money?”

“Yeah,” C.P. said. “Move it around and see how much of it is in there. No, wait. Put on some gloves before you do that.”

“Why?”

“Because when the cops come to arrest him, you don’t want that guy to say you were his accomplice. You don’t want your fingerprints on the packets. He might try to implicate you, even though you were his victim and everything.”

“Fingerprints,” she said. “Right.”

She still didn’t really understand, but she went to the closet and took out a pair of mittens.

“Don’t you have anything with fingers?” he asked as he watched her pull them on.

“No, I only know how to knit mittens,” she said. “Do you have gloves?”

“Not exactly,” he said, and took his out of his pocket and put them on. They looked like mittens at first, and then he unbuttoned a button at the top of the palm and they were half-gloves underneath, leaving the tops of his fingers bare. “Not very good for hiding your fingerprints, although they are useful when you need more mobility with your hands than you can get from a mitten.”

Mattie knelt in front of the trunk again and swept some of the packets to the side. Underneath there were several stacks of wrapped bills and a pile of newspaper clippings.

“There must be thousands of dollars,” C.P. said. “If you took this you could buy an island in the middle of the ocean.”

“An island,” Mattie said. She’d never been to an island, although she had a sudden vision of sand and sun and a lone palm tree.

She picked up the pile of newspaper clippings. There was a black-and-white picture of a little girl with light hair and dark eyes smiling awkwardly from the first one, her head tilted just a little too far back so that she appeared off-center.

“That’s you,” he said. “Oh my god. I don’t think you should look at those clippings.”

“Me?” she said, staring at the little girl. “This is me?”

There were no mirrors in William’s cabin. Mattie hadn’t tracked the changes in her face and body as the years passed because it had been years since she’d seen herself. It had been such a long time that she’d forgotten the shape of her eyes and her nose and her mouth and her cheeks.

The little girl in Mattie’s hand wavered, and she realized her hand was shaking.

“Here, give me those. You don’t need to see those,” C.P. said.

“No,” she said, and forced herself to take deep breaths, to make her hand stop shaking. “I know you want to help. But I need to see. I need to know.”

There was a headline above the picture of the awkwardly smiling girl. “TRAGEDY—8-year-old girl missing after mother found brutally murdered.”

She placed the clipping to one side. The next clipping had the same picture of herself, this time below larger text that said: “MISSING—police seek information.”

The third clipping made her breath stop.

The headline read: “MURDER AND KIDNAPPING IN A SMALL TOWN.” And there was the picture of herself again, smiling her awkward smile. But Mattie didn’t care about that picture. Next to it was a candid photo of a woman wearing a checked shirt, her smile a little too wide to be considered pretty, her right hand pushing her hair back from her face.

Her mother.

“Mom,” she said. She felt the tears—they were blocking her throat and pushing against the backs of her eyes. But she didn’t cry. She stroked the picture with her finger, because she had a face now for the person she’d once loved most in the world. “I forgot your face.”

And even though Mattie stared down at her mother, she still couldn’t dredge up a memory of her mom’s face.

“Look, we should, um, stay on track,” C.P. said. “I know this is important to you, and finding this stuff explains a lot, but we really need to get going. There are only so many hours of daylight.”

“I know,” Mattie said, and sighed. She folded up all of the newspaper clippings and put them in her pocket.

“I can’t believe that sicko kept cuttings of his own crime,” C.P. said. “You should take some of that money. I think you earned it.”

Mattie hesitated. Now that she knew how William earned his keep, the money felt wrong, somehow dirty. She didn’t know exactly what heroin was but C.P. said it was a drug and all she remembered from childhood was that drugs were bad, that they ruined lives. Should she take money earned on the back of someone’s ruined life?

He ruined your life, too. And principles won’t feed you.

She took two stacks of bills, which seemed like more money than she would ever need, and then closed the trunk and locked it again. She stood up, holding the keys in one hand and the money in the other. The money felt like it was burning her.

“You get all your cold weather