Read Online The Winter People by Jennifer McMahon - Free Book Online

Save had double-coupon day.
    This was all, obviously, a big mistake. Their mother would turn up at any moment, and they’d all have a good belly laugh about the idea that she, of all people, would go missing.

Ruthie
    Ruthie spent nearly an hour searching the house, yard, and barn, but found no sign of her mother. Though her boots and coat were missing, the truck was still in the barn, keys tucked in the visor. There were no footsteps in the snow (of course, it was entirely possible that there had been and they were now buried).
    Ruthie stood in the barn, gazing helplessly around at the broken-down lawn tractor, stack of summer tires, screen doors and windows, sacks of chicken feed. Nothing was out of place. Everything seemed normal.
    She closed her eyes, pictured her mother looking at her over the tops of her drugstore reading glasses, her gray hair pulled back in a braid, one of her chunky hand-knit sweaters on. “Part of the trick to finding a lost thing,” her mother once told her, “is discovering all the places it’s not.”
    Ruthie smiled. “Okay, then. Let’s find out where you’re not.”
    Ruthie walked around to the back of the barn to check on the chickens. They were in a big wooden coop with an enclosed run of wire mesh. She unhitched the gate, walked through, and unlatched the coop.
    “Hey, girls,” she whispered, voice low and soothing. “How was your night, huh?” The chickens gave anxious little coos and clucks. Ruthie tossed them cracked corn from the bucket outside, made sure their food and heated water dispensers were full.
    “You didn’t happen to see where Mom went, did you?”
    More clucking.
    “Didn’t think so,” she said, backing out of the coop.
    She left the barn and looked out across the yard, into the woods. It had snowed more in the night, covering the yard in a flat moonscape of white.
    Ruthie mentally ticked off all the places her mother was not: the house, the yard, the barn, the chicken coop. And she didn’t take the truck.
    “Mom!” she called as loud as she could. Ridiculous, really. The snowy landscape seemed to absorb all sound; it felt as if she were yelling into cotton batting.
    Ruthie looked across the yard to where the woods began. The idea of her mother traipsing off into the woods in the dark of a winter’s night was absurd—as far as Ruthie knew, her mother
never
set foot in the woods. She had her set routes for chores—paths led to and from the woodpile, the barn, the chicken coop, the compost pile near the vegetable garden—from which she never deviated. Her mother believed in efficiency. Going off the path, exploring, aimless walks—these were wastes of time and energy that could be better spent on keeping warm, producing food.
    But still, she might as well rule out all possibilities, however unlikely. She headed back into the barn, grabbed a pair of snowshoes, and strapped them on.
    Slowly, reluctantly, she crossed the yard and headed for the woods. Like it or not, she was going to have to do it: pass by the place where she’d found her dad.
    O nce, the whole area north and east of the house and barn had been open farmland, but now it was grown over with poplars, maples, and a stand of white pine. Over the years, the woods had been encroaching on the house and yard, moving closer bit by bit, threatening to overtake their little white farmhouse. The trees were too close together, it was harder to navigate here, the path a tangle of roots and saplings and large rocks poking through the snow to catch her snowshoes. Their land was covered in rocks; it never ceased to amaze Ruthie, the way they would surface each spring in their yard and garden, countless wheelbarrowfuls that they dumped out in thewoods, or piled up on the stone wall that ran along the eastern edge of the yard.
    Ruthie had always hated being in the woods and had rarely come out this way, even as a young child. Back then she had been sure that the hillside was full of witches and