Kaki Warner Page 3

  “You lost?” Daniel called.

  No answer.

  “If you are, come inside and warm up. You’re safe here.”

  Nothing.

  Had he imagined this, too? Growing uneasy, he called the dog.

  The hound turned and looked at him but didn’t move.

  “Come, Roscoe. Now!”

  Reluctantly the dog came to his side. Daniel loaded up with firewood again, and making sure the dog followed, tromped back to the cabin.

  That night, he didn’t work on the dollhouse. Instead, he dreamed of firm-bodied women with silky blonde hair and eyes the greenish-blue color of a high mountain lake. At dawn, he awoke sweating, the quilts twisted around his legs, with an empty ache in his chest.

  He stayed busy throughout the day, shoveling paths to the barn and woodshed, cleaning the stalls, hauling water from the creek. By late afternoon, he was so stiff he moved like an old man, but at least the chores were done. After adding two limp carrots, an onion, and a couple of potatoes to his venison stew, he put it on to cook, then filled every other pot he owned and set them by the hearth. While the water heated, he pulled the dented metal tub from the back stoop, then stripped down and checked his stitches.

  Two had torn loose. But they weren’t infected, and the rest were itching, so he figured it was time. He snipped through each horsehair knot without cutting himself more than a couple of times. With a whiskey-soaked kerchief and a lot of cussing, he cleaned the wound and sopped up what blood there was, then filled the tub and climbed in, a brick of soap in one hand, the whiskey bottle in the other.

  The tub was woefully small. But with his knees bent and his feet outside the tub, he had enough room to slouch down with his butt against one end and his shoulders against the other, so that water covered him from chest to hip. He took a long swallow from the bottle, sucked air against his teeth to ease the burn, then started scrubbing.

  “I ought to bathe you, too,” he told the hound dozing by the hearth. “Serve you right for not coming when I called.”

  Roscoe lifted his head to stare mournfully at him, then sighed and let it drop back to the plank floor.

  “You’re useless, that’s what you are. You and that sorry horse.”

  Roscoe didn’t respond. Pleased to have the last word, Daniel tipped his head back against the rim and sighed as warmth spread through his aching body. Steam curled around him. Knotted muscles loosened. Closing his eyes, he let the whiskey dull his headache and send his mind into a peaceful drift.

  “You promised.”

  “Jesus!” Daniel lurched upright. Cool water sloshed out of the tub and onto the floor. He scanned the shadows but saw nothing move. “Who’s there?”

  No response.

  “I’m tired of this game. Show yourself.”

  Silence.

  Roscoe rose from the hearth and went to sniff at the crack beneath the door. Lifting a paw, he whined and scratched at the wood.

  Daniel rose, toweled off, and stepped into his trousers. He didn’t waste time hunting up a shirt. The cabin was dark now except for the flickering light from the fire in the hearth. Padding barefoot across the cold floor, he grabbed his jacket off the hook, pulled it on, lifted his repeater from the pegs on the wall, and chambered a round. He yanked open the door.

  Roscoe rushed out.

  Cold air rushed in, prickling Daniel’s damp skin. Keeping his finger on the trigger and resting the barrel loosely in the crook of his left arm, he scanned the yard. An unbroken dusting of snow covered over old tracks. No new ones showed. Other than Roscoe racing toward the woodshed, no dark shadows moved across the white expanse.

  “You there,” he called loudly. “Come out. Now!”

  Silence except for the whining of the hound as he took off into the trees.

  Shivering so hard his teeth chattered, Daniel stepped back into the house and slammed the door. His mind running in circles, he finished dressing by the hearth. This couldn’t all be just an overactive imagination. Someone was up to mischief. But why? And who?

  Confused and starting to doubt his own mind, he pulled on his boots and jacket, picked up the rifle, and went back outside. He checked the barn, found it bolted, as he’d left it. Merlin rested quietly in his stall. The chickens had roosted for the night. Even in the dim light of the early crescent moon, he could see no new tracks circling the paddocks or cabin. Everything seemed as it should be.

  Then who kept calling to him? And why?

  He made another circuit, still saw nothing to cause alarm, finally gave up and went back into the house. It made no sense. None of it. Either someone was toying with him or he was losing his mind.

  He didn’t like either option.

  Hunched over his bowl at the table, he ate his stew without really tasting it while he played it all back in his head. Every word the intruder had spoken. Roscoe’s odd behavior. His own unshakable certainty that the voice he’d heard had been real. Maybe even familiar.

  He wasn’t crazy. Not yet, anyway.

  A thought burst into his mind—one that had hovered just out of reach all day—a thought so unreasoning and far-fetched he hadn’t wanted to acknowledge it.

  It took the breath out of him. Froze him where he sat, his fork hanging in midair. Because now he knew why he had felt that vague sense of familiarity. He had heard those words before. Heard them spoken in that same voice.

  By the girl under the snow.

  The one Doc said wasn’t there.

  ***

  Daniel wasn’t afraid of much. During the war, he had stood firm against rifle fire and cannonade, and later had been tested in the dark tunnels blasted out by the railroads. With the loss of his family, he had withstood a depth of loss and pain that had almost driven him to his knees. But the idea of no longer being able to tell what was real from what was not was unimaginable. Intolerable. Horrifying. He had seen insanity in other men—in the eyes of those who had survived the horrors of Andersonville—on the slack-jawed faces that peered back through the barred windows of asylums for the deranged—and once in a shaggy-haired trapper who had lived alone in the wilderness for so long that just seeing Daniel ride up had sent him into babbling, scuttling flight.

  The thought of that happening to him awakened a new kind of terror.

  He wrestled with that fear through the night as he lay in his rope-strung bed, watching fire shadows dance across the overhead beams. He second-guessed each decision, analyzed mannerisms for evidence of craziness, and dissected his every action for signs that his mind had suddenly betrayed him.

  Was Doc right? Was it all just his imagination? But how could that be?

  By the time dawn turned the dark windowpanes to frosted gold, he had arrived at the only logical explanation he could find: It was Doc who was wrong, not him. The girl was real.

  And he would prove it.

  Rising from his tangled bed with new purpose, he set out to do just that, determined that if he heard her again, he would track her down and make her face him. He would find out why she was wandering around these woods, and what she wanted from him, and what was wrong with her parents that they’d let her run loose this way.

  And then everything would be all right.

  But he didn’t hear a word from her that day, or the next, or the next.

  Even so, as he went about his routine throughout the rest of the week, he kept a close watch on the woods that ringed the cabin. He checked the woodshed often, and carefully watched Roscoe, who seemed to know when she was around.

  But nothing out of the ordinary happened. No voices called out to him. No unfamiliar tracks broke the snow. No odd, disjointed dreams disturbed his sleep.

  So he allowed himself to relax.

  Even the urgency to finish the dollhouse diminished, although he continued to work on it for an hour or two each evening. He slept better at night and found himself whistling as he went about his chores. The aches and pains from the avalanche bothered him less every day. Even the headaches stopped.
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  Everything was fine.

  He looked better, too, he decided one morning as he studied his reflection in a shard of mirror that had escaped his earlier destruction. The knot by his temple was less swollen and discolored. The cut in his side had healed well, and all his other bruises and scrapes had faded to a sickly green. Put an angel on his head and a garland around his neck, and he might have passed for a Christmas tree.

  He felt good. And strong. And sane. He even trimmed his hair and started shaving every other day, just to prove to himself he wasn’t headed south like that wild-eyed trapper. He was all right.

  And that was that.

  Winter wrapped his little cabin in a frigid cocoon. Clear, sunny days and below-zero nights left a hard, icy crust on top of the snow, which made footing treacherous, even when he wore snowshoes. Each morning, the layer of ice on the creek behind the house was a little thicker, and he had to hack at it with the ax a little longer to break through it. He wasn’t sure what he would do if it froze solid. After so many hard freezes, there wasn’t much moisture left in the snow, and he needed at least seven gallons of water a day to meet his needs, as well as those of his animals.

  The nights were brutal. Even with the fire blazing constantly, the cabin grew so cold the logs popped and sang as sap froze and new splits opened in the contracting wood.

  But he heard no more voices and slept without dreams.

  In mid-December, he finished the dollhouse. He still didn’t know why he’d taken on such a task, and now that it was completed, although he was pleased with his work, he wasn’t sure what to do with it. It looked forlorn sitting there gathering dust, almost as if it was waiting for a lighter heart and smaller hands to come open the hinged back and give it life. Bothered by the way the two upstairs windows seemed to watch him as he moved about the cabin, he tossed a blanket over the peaked roof and shoved the whole thing into a corner and out of the way.

  A few mornings later, he awoke to eye-searing sunshine slanting through his bedside window, Roscoe scratching to get out, and the muffled whumps of snow sliding off the roof and hitting the ground around the cabin. Or maybe that was Merlin on the porch again.

  He quickly dressed.

  A warm chinook wind met him at the door, moaning through the eaves and sweeping snow off drooping limbs to send it swirling across the clearing in powdery flurries. The encircling woods awakened in the sunshine, the bowed heads of the firs bouncing erect as their white mantles slid off in glittering gusts.

  Energized by the warm spell, and thinking this would be a good day to restock his larder, Daniel hurried through his morning chores. A buck would provide enough meat to get him through December and into the new year, and if he could bag a brace of ptarmigan or maybe a hare or two, he would be set through the worst of the winter weather.

  Whistling through his teeth, he came around the side of the cabin, then stumbled to a stop when he saw a figure standing beside Roscoe at the woodshed.

  Even though windblown snow obscured her features, he could see it was a child, dressed in a coat that was too small and a slouch hat that was too big, pulled low over blonde hair. A red woolen scarf covered the lower half of her face.

  A shock of recognition drove the air out of him. It was her. The girl he had heard when he was trapped under the snow. He wasn’t sure how he knew that, but he was certain of it.

  “You didn’t come.” Her words sounded clearly, despite the scarf across her mouth and chin. It was the same voice that had haunted him since the avalanche.

  He took a step forward. “Who are you? What are you doing here?”

  She stepped back.

  Fearing if he tried to approach she might bolt, he hunkered on his heel to appear less of a threat, and put on a smile. “What’s your name?” he called, working to keep his voice soft and calm.

  “Hannah.”

  “Just Hannah? No last name?”

  “Ellis.”

  She was a skinny little thing, no more than five or six years old, wearing a faded blue dress that hung too short, and scuffed, high-top boots that looked too big around her thin, stockinged ankles. One small fingertip poked through a hole in her woolen mitten, and she plucked at it in a worried, nervous way. Except for a cold-reddened nose, her skin was pale against the red scarf, and her eyes looked too big in her small face. He couldn’t tell their color, but the shape of them seemed somehow familiar.

  “Are you from town, Hannah Ellis? From New Hope?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “Where are your parents?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Are you lost?”

  Words burst out of her, shrill and wobbly. “Why didn’t you come, Daniel?”

  Daniel. She knew his name, so it had to be the girl in the snow. But how? And what was she doing here? Desperate to make sense of her sudden appearance, he struggled to keep the conversation going.

  “Come where, Hannah?”

  “I’ve been waiting for you.”

  “For me? Why?”

  “You promised.” She looked back at the trees.

  He saw a shiver run through her and realized she was probably cold from standing there so long.

  “Would you like to come inside and get warm, Hannah?”

  She turned back, her eyes wet. “I want to go home.”

  “Where’s that?”

  He could sense her drifting away and quickly rose. “Okay, Hannah. I’ll take you home.” Hopefully that was in New Hope, and if not, maybe someone there knew where she belonged.

  “What if he won’t let you?”

  “What if who won’t let me?”

  “The man.”

  “What man?”

  That shiver again.

  Daniel scanned the trees behind her but saw nothing move in the shadows. Roscoe sat beside her, relaxed, his tail wagging. “What’s the man’s name?” he asked, trying to mask his growing concern behind a friendly tone.

  The wind gusted, hiding her behind a flurry of powdery snow.

  “Does he hurt you, Hannah? Is he mean to you?”

  “He talks funny.”

  “In what way? What does he say?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Striving for patience, he tried a different track. “Why doesn’t he want you to leave?”

  “It would make the lady sad. She talks funny, too.”

  “What lady?”

  “I have to go.” She stepped back, fading into the swirling whiteness.

  “Wait!” When he saw he’d frightened her, he softened his voice. “I can see you’re cold. Why don’t you come inside and get warm. Then we’ll go into town and find your folks. All right?” Smiling, he held out a hand.

  She didn’t move.

  Tamping down his frustration, he let his hand drop back to his side. He wished she’d take off the scarf so he could see her face. He had a feeling she was crying, but couldn’t tell beneath the swirling snow that had grown as thick as fog. And yet, oddly, even without being able to watch her lips move, he understood every word she spoke. “Will you wait here, then, while I get my pack and snowshoes? Roscoe will keep you company. Isn’t that right, Roscoe?”

  No response. From either the girl or the dog.

  “All right, then. I’ll be right back.”

  Hurrying toward the cabin, he mentally listed all the things he would need. It was only a five-mile trek to New Hope, but with a child along and the weather unpredictable, he didn’t want to be unprepared. Blankets, food, water, rope, canvas, a hatchet. There was a sled in the barn. He would load everything onto that. He could move faster pulling her on a sled than carrying her on his back.

  As he stuffed jerky, matches, and other emergency supplies into his pack, he wondered again what she was doing out here, and what kind of parents would let a child wander off by herself in the middle of winter. These mountains were full of dangers, not the least of which was the cold. If it had been his child . . .

  He pressed his lips tight, unable to fin
ish the thought.

  After lacing his pack closed, he slung it over one shoulder and threw the blankets over the other. Picking up his rifle, he opened the door and almost tripped over Roscoe, who was parked on the porch. “What are you doing up here,” he asked, surprised that the hound had deserted his charge. But when he looked over at the woodshed, he saw that the blowing snow had settled as the wind died, and there was no sign of the girl.

  Damn. Dropping his gear, he stepped off the porch and into the yard. “Hannah?”

  No answer.

  He strode toward the shed, his irritation building. Now he’d have to waste valuable time hunting for her. “Damn it, Roscoe!” He glared down at the dog trotting happily at his side. “You were supposed to stay with her.”

  The hound grinned up at him like he had good sense.

  She wasn’t in the woodshed, and the snow was too churned up to show him which way she had gone when she left. In fact, he saw no small tracks that might have belonged to a child, either coming or going.

  “Hannah?” he called again.

  Silence.

  Slogging through the snow, he circled the cabin, then the barn, then went into the woods and checked for signs of her there. He called until his voice grew hoarse.

  Nothing. Somehow she had disappeared without leaving a single trace.

  Alarmed now, he returned to the porch. Quickly, he laced on his snowshoes, then grabbed his rifle and pack. Calling Roscoe, he started down the road at a rolling jog, snowshoes slipping on the wet, slushy snow, anger building as blood pumped through his laboring body.

  He would find Hannah’s parents and give them hell for letting her run loose in this weather. Then he would get Doc, and anybody else he could round up, and start combing these woods.

  He’d already lost one child because he hadn’t been there to help.

  He wouldn’t lose another.

  ***

  It was midafternoon when he reached New Hope. Doc Halstead wasn’t in his office, so Daniel continued on into the town’s business district.

  There wasn’t much to it, especially now that half of the right side of the main street had been damaged by the snowslide. In front of what remained of the Mercantile, Homer Cranston was loading lumber out of a buckboard and sliding it through one of the shattered front windows of his store.