Only the tracks have abruptly stopped. I am standing looking at an untouched square of white snow surrounding a statue of a woman holding up snow-covered arms as if remarking on the emptiness of the space around her. I check to see if Oren is hiding behind the statue but he is not. I look back at the tracks I was following but my tracks have covered Oren’s. As if I’ve wiped them out.
I choke back a sob. I’m being ridiculous. There has to be an explanation—
And I know what it is. In that horrible movie the little boy leads his crazy father into the maze and then walks backward in his own footprints to trick him. That’s what Oren has done to me. He’s tricked me and abandoned me.
I sink down into the snow, my back against the statue’s stone base, and try to get my breathing under control. That boy poured his secrets into my ear and I did nothing. He could be making it up, I thought. No one will believe you, I told myself. Especially the last thing Oren had said. He couldn’t have known that. But the truth was I was afraid of what Davis would do if I told anyone. I put my own safety before Oren’s.
I cry until the tears freeze on my face, until I am so cold I might as well become another statue at the feet of the stone saint.
And what good will that do?
The voice—a boy’s voice—is so close that I snap open my eyes, sure it is Oren come back for me. But I’m alone. I notice, though, something I hadn’t noticed before. Across from the opening in the hedge I came through there’s another opening. And there are footprints there. I get up to look. They’re the same boot prints. The same duckfooted gait. Oren. Somehow he crossed the expanse of the square and went out the other opening without making a footprint in the square. Did he jump onto the base of the statue? Or sweep the prints away? Maybe the wind blew them away.
I wipe the tears from my face and follow the footprints back through the maze. When I finally exit I find Oren standing to the side of the opening, the sled by his side, looking up at the top of the hill. Mattie is still talking to the policeman, flapping her arms around like an agitated goose. The policeman’s watching her, arms crossed over his broad chest. At last he turns away from her and heads to his cruiser.
“It’s okay,” Oren says, looking back at me. “Mattie told him a story to get rid of him.”
I don’t ask how he knows that. I kneel down and turn him around to look at me, my hands digging into his narrow, frail shoulders. “Don’t ever run away from me like that again,” I cry, my voice coming out angrier than I meant it to. “You scared me half to death.”
His eyes get wide the way they would when Davis yelled at him. “I just wanted to show you I could take care of myself,” he says in a small scared whisper. “Didn’t you see how I doubled back like that boy in the movie?”
“Don’t make things up,” I say, shaking him just a little. I’m not the same as Davis, it’s just that when he makes things up it scares me. Like the thing he’d said that day into the can. “I saw your tracks leading out the other way.”
“What other way?” Oren asks, the tears spilling now, his mouth an O of hurt. “I came back the same way.”
But that can’t be. No more than Oren could have known what he told me through the tin can. I’d believed all the things he said that Davis had done to him. But after he’d listed them all he said, It won’t stop there. If we don’t leave he’ll kill both of us.
Chapter Eight
Mattie
I’LL GO SPEAK with him,” Sister Martine says, getting to her feet. “You go out the back door and get the boy and his mother away. I’ll call you later to arrange a meeting place.”
This would be a fine plan if Sister Martine could walk at a regular pace, but despite her best efforts (and some very un-nun-like muttering), by the time we get to the front door the officer has already gotten out of his cruiser and is walking toward the rim of the sledding hill.
There’s no way Sister Martine is going across that snow. I tell her I’ll call her later and wade into the drifts, calling Frank’s name. Because of course that’s who it is. Frank Barnes, Delphi’s chief of police. The last man I want to talk to right now.
On the plus side I don’t have to worry about how ridiculous I look. Frank crosses his arms over his chest and watches me wade through the snow. He could come to me, but he’s not going to make this any easier. For him I’ll always be the spoiled brat who grew up in the big house on the hill. Judge Lane’s daughter.
The Little Judge, he’d call me when I accused him of cheating at Monopoly or when I’d balk at some quasi-criminal prank he’d dreamed up, like sneaking into the courthouse at night or dressing up the statue of George Washington in women’s clothing. For a police chief’s son he had remarkably little respect for the law, which I’d always attributed to a contrary streak in his nature. Most things about Frank have changed since we were kids playing pranks—except for that contrary streak. He’s happy to stand and let me make a fool of myself bleating like a stray lamb stuck out in the snow.
I have the urge to give him the finger and turn around, but just past Frank’s bulky shape (he’s put on weight this winter, but then so have I) I spy a flash of Oren’s red jacket and blue cap on the hill. If Frank sees Oren and Alice he’ll know they’re not local. He’ll want to talk to them, and then he might connect them to that mother and son on the run from New Jersey.
“Yoo-hoo!” I call, hating myself for sounding like the dotty old spinster everyone thinks I am. But sometimes it’s better to play the harmless old lady. “Frank Barnes! Just who I wanted to talk to. Do you have a minute? Or are you out here looking to ticket speeding sledders?”
He doesn’t crack a smile. “I don’t know, Mattie, are you planning to sled? If you sled the way you drive I may have to.”
I force myself to laugh as I traverse the last few feet between us. Frank has pulled me over for speeding half a dozen times over the years and once for an illegal U-turn on Main Street at three in the morning. I’ve accused him of lying in wait for me in various alleys and lay-bys throughout the county. “Oh, I think my sledding days are behind me. I’d probably break a hip.” Out of the corner of my eye I see Oren pulling his mother toward the hedge maze. Clever boy. If they can hide in there until I get rid of Frank we’ll be okay.
“I think you’re made of stronger stuff than that, Mattie. What are you doing out here?”
“Just dropping off some donations.” I glance back at the building so I don’t have to meet Frank’s eyes. We’ve known each other since we were kids. Our fathers were friends—the judge and the chief of police—and we used to play while our fathers jawed on the front porch of my father’s law offices. One of the games we’d play was Three Truths and a Lie. Frank always knew what my lie was. “And having a chat with Sister Martine. Is that who you’re here to see?”
“I’m looking for a woman and boy gone missing from northern New Jersey,” he says. “I thought they might have landed here. Unless they turned up at Sanctuary.”
“A woman and boy?” I echo. “How old’s the boy? There was a woman with a three-year-old in two days ago who needed help applying for food stamps.” This is true so I give Frank a steady look, daring him to accuse me of making up indigent women and children.