Free The Winter People by Jennifer McMahon

the rocks, then circle back.
    She was out of breath by the time she reached the Devil’s Hand, partly from the effort of the climb, but mostly because she was moving so damn fast—she wanted to get this done.
    The huge dark rocks jutted up from the ground as if they’d grown there, sprung up like jagged mutant mushrooms. There werefive stones—the five fingers—jutting up from the earth, leaning back as if the hand were open, waiting to catch something (or someone, she thought). The stones that formed the palm were low and covered with snow, but the taller ones stuck out, looking to Ruthie not like fingers but more like dark, pointed teeth.
    My, what big teeth you have
.
    All the better to eat you with, my dear
.
    Standing in the shadow of the tallest stone—the central finger, which rose nearly twenty feet into the air—she yelled for her mother one more time. “Mom!”
    She waited, listening to the sound of her own breath until it seemed so loud it was as if the forest were breathing with her.
    Ruthie tightened the straps on her snowshoes and hurried back down to the house, slipping and sliding, falling several times; she moved as quickly as she could, trying to ignore the sense that she was being chased.
    D id she take the truck?” Fawn asked.
    Ruthie shook her head. She’d stopped back at the coop after putting the snowshoes away and grabbed some eggs from the nesting boxes. She carefully took them from her pockets and set them on the counter. She was cold, exhausted. Her legs and lungs burned from her snowshoe adventure up the hill.
    “Where’s Mom?” Fawn asked, chin quivering, eyes damp and bulging like a frog’s.
    “I don’t know,” Ruthie admitted.
    “Shouldn’t we call someone?” Fawn asked.
    “What, like the police? I’m pretty sure you can’t even report a missing person until they’ve been gone for twenty-four hours. She hasn’t even been gone for twelve hours. And Mom would freak, Fawn. You know that.”
    “But … it’s so cold out there. What if she’s hurt?”
    “I looked everywhere she could possibly go. There’s just no way Mom’s out there. I promise.”
    “So what do we do?” Fawn asked.
    “We wait. That’s what she’d want us to do. If she’s not backby tonight, maybe we call the cops then, I’m not sure.” She ruffled her little sister’s hair and gave her best it’s-going-to-be-okay smile. “We’ll be fine.”
    Fawn bit her lip, looked like she was about to start crying. “She wouldn’t leave us.”
    Ruthie put her arm around her little sister, pulled her into a hug. “I know. We’ll figure it out. After breakfast, we’ll look for clues. People don’t disappear without a trace. It’ll be like playing Nancy Drew.”
    “Who?”
    “Forget it. Just trust me, okay? We’ll be fine. We’ll find her. I promise.”

Katherine
    Sometimes, when Katherine woke in the night, she could almost feel them both there beside her. She imagined the other side of the bed was warm, and if she squinted her eyes just right, the pillow seemed to bear a soft indent where their two heads had lain. She’d roll over in the morning and press the pillow to her face, trying to catch a scent of them.
    It wasn’t just shampoo, shaving lotion, and motorcycle grease. It was all of that blended together with something intoxicatingly spicy underneath—the essence of Gary. And Austin, he’d smelled like warm milk and honey, a sweet ambrosia that she could drink up and live on forever. In the soft hours of early morning, before the sun came up, she believed it just might be possible to distill everything a person was down to a scent.
    Once she was awake, like now, sitting in the kitchen with a cup of French roast in her hand and still wearing one of Gary’s old T-shirts, she realized how silly the thought was, knew that their being in bed with her was only a dream, a body memory perhaps. Like a person feeling pain in a phantom limb.
    How many mornings had they spent like that, Austin