The Hunger(8)

When her fiancé was killed, her greatest sense was of relief—though she was mightily ashamed for it. She knew her father had pinned everything on her planned marriage and the better circumstances it would have allowed all of them.

Her sister’s marriage had been practical, but it had also been one of love. For Mary, Franklin Graves had always had other plans, she knew. He’d always imagined she’d be the one to make the kind of advantageous match that would save them all. She could hardly count the many times he’d told her she was his only hope.

She could hardly count, either, the many times she’d wished that Sarah had been born the prettier one and not her, the one on whose shoulders others’ happiness rested.

Harriet stood, cradling her washtub on her hip. “God has a special plan for each of us and it’s not for us to question the wisdom of his ways, only to listen and obey. I’m going to head back to camp. Are you coming with me, Elitha?”

Elitha shook her head. “I’m not done yet.”

Mary placed a hand on Elitha’s arm. “Don’t worry. I’ll wait with you and we can go back together.”

“Very well,” Harriet called over her shoulder as she started back. “Dinner won’t make itself.”

Elitha waited until Harriet was out of earshot before speaking. “You don’t mind me talking to you about this, do you, Mary?” Her eyes were suddenly huge and round. “Because I just have to tell someone. It wasn’t the voices that scared me, not like I said.” She glanced furtively over her shoulder again. “It’s always been like that with me. Tamsen says that I’m sensitive—to the spirit world, she means. She’s interested in all that. She had her palm read by this woman back in Springfield. Had her fortune told with the cards, too. This woman told Tamsen that the spirits liked me. That they found it easy to talk to me.”

Mary hesitated, then took Elitha’s hand, cold from the water. “It’s okay. You can tell me. Did something happen?”

Elitha nodded slowly. “Two days ago, when we came across that abandoned trapper’s cabin . . .”

“Ash Hollow?” Mary asked. She could still picture the tiny makeshift shack, boards bleached bone-white by the relentless prairie sun. A sad, lonely place, like the abandoned farmhouse she used to pass every Sunday on her way to service. Stripped nearly bare by the elements, dark empty windows like the hollow eye sockets of a skull, a stark reminder of another family’s failure. Let that be a lesson, her father had said to her once as they slowly rolled by it in the wagon, not too many years after they, too, had been on the verge of losing everything. But for the grace of God, that might have been us.

The world was fragile. One day, growth; the next day, kindling.

Elitha squeezed her eyes shut. “Yes. Ash Hollow. Did you go inside?”

Mary shook her head.

“It was filled with letters. Hundreds of them. Stacked on a table, held down with rocks. Mr. Bryant told me that pioneers leave them so that the next traveler heading east can take them to the first post office he sees.” Elitha looked at Mary uncertainly. “Would you think I was bad if I told you I read some?”

“But, Elitha. They weren’t meant for you.”

Elitha blushed. “I figured it wouldn’t harm anyone. It would be like reading stories. Most of the letters weren’t sealed, only folded up and left on the table, so the writer had to know that anybody could read them. Only it turned out they weren’t letters.”

Mary blinked, uncomprehending. She looked at Elitha crouched before her, pale as the rising moon. “What do you mean?”

“They weren’t addressed to anyone,” Elitha said. Her voice had dropped to a whisper. “And there wasn’t any news in them . . . I opened letter after letter, and they all said the same thing, over and over.”

“I still don’t understand.” Mary felt as if a spider were tracking up and down her spine. “If they weren’t letters, what were they?”

Elitha thrust a hand awkwardly in her apron pocket. She drew out a small folded square of paper and handed it to Mary. “I kept one of them. I thought I should show it to someone, but I haven’t yet. I didn’t know who to show it to. Nobody would believe me. Maybe they’d think I wrote it myself, to get attention. But I didn’t, Mary. I didn’t.”

Mary took the paper. It was brittle and fragile from many days in the heat. She unfolded it carefully, afraid it might disintegrate in her hands. The ink was faded, as though it had been written a long time ago, but she didn’t have any problem making out the words.

Turn back, it said in a thin, spidery hand. Turn back or you will all die.





CHAPTER FOUR





They found the Nystrom boy, or what was left of him, later that same night.

A knot of dread clogged Stanton’s throat as he followed George Donner through the circle of wagons and headed into the dark, empty plain.

Two of the teamsters had made the discovery just minutes before, as they were driving the cattle out to graze for the evening. Through the fading light, they’d seen a depression in the tall grass and went to investigate. Both were hardy men, but nonetheless what they found had made one of them heave.

Dots of light floated ahead in the darkness and at first Stanton thought they were an illusion of some kind, but as he got closer the pinpricks became flame, and then torches. A dozen men were already assembled in a circle, the torches like a halo of flame over their heads. Stanton knew most of them—William Eddy, Lewis Keseberg, and Jacob Wolfinger, as well as Edwin Bryant—but there were a few from the original wagon party, friends of the boy’s family, he’d seen only in passing. A strange noise, halfway between a cry and a howl, rose off in the distance, rolling toward them from across the empty plain like a wave.