The Winter People by Jennifer McMahon Read Free Book Online Page A

Road?”
    Ruthie shook her head and started stepping away, thinking she’d leave Emily and go back down to the bonfire. She had no interest in a redneck gearhead, no matter how cute he might be.
    “Nah,” Buzz said. “Didn’t think so. How about the Devil’s Hand? You ever been up there?”
    This stopped her.
    “I live right next to it,” she said.
    “No shit? It’s a damn strange place. It’s almost like the rockswere put there by someone, right?” Buzz leaned against a lichen-covered headstone.
    Ruthie shrugged. She’d never really thought about it that way before.
    “You believe in aliens?” he asked.
    “You mean, like, from outer space? Um … no.”
    Buzz looked down into his cup of beer. “Well, personally, that’s my theory for how the rocks got there. I go up there all the time. I’m actually making a sculpture of it in my uncle’s shop. You should come check it out.”
    “A sculpture?” she asked, stepping closer again. They spent the rest of the night talking about art, UFOs, the pros and cons of getting a business degree, movies they’d seen, how they both felt they were stuck in families where they were totally misunderstood. They wandered around the cemetery, checking out the names and dates on the stones, trying to imagine what kinds of lives these people might have had, how they’d died.
    “Look at this one,” Buzz had said, running his fingers over letters on a plain granite marker. “Hester Jameson. She was only nine when she died. Just a kid. Pretty sad, huh?”
    They’d been together ever since that night. Staying with him one more year sounded all right—more than all right, maybe, especially in moments like this, when they were side by side in the cab of his truck, stoned, cocooned and warm, careening through the darkness like nothing could stop them.
    “You don’t think your mom’s up, do you?” Buzz asked.
    “Hope not,” Ruthie said.
    “Yeah, she’d have a bird.”
    Ruthie laughed at the expression, but she knew it was true.
    It wasn’t just her mother—the whole town was worried, uptight, keeping their kids locked in at night. Back in early December, a sixteen-year-old girl named Willa Luce had disappeared without a trace, walking the half-mile home from a friend’s house. Just before that, two sheep and a cow were found with their throats slit. And of course, before that, there had been the other disappearances: a boy who went missing in 1952 after his friends watched him crawl into a cave no one could find again, a hunter back in 1973 who’d beenseparated from his friends and never returned to camp, and the most famous, the college girl in 1982 who’d gone hiking with her boyfriend. The young man had come out of the woods alone, catatonic, and covered in blood. He was never able to say what had happened, and had been charged with her murder even though no body was ever found. In the end, he was deemed insane and sent to the state hospital.
    The West Hall Triangle, people called it. There was talk of satanic cults, a twisted killer, a door to another dimension, and, of course, aliens, like Buzz and his friends believed.
    Ruthie thought it was all a crock of shit. She wasn’t sure what was up with the livestock, but guessed it was just bored kids screwing around. The little boy and the hunter probably just got lost in the acres and acres of forest. You get lost, you get cold, find someplace warm to curl up, and the next thing you know, your bones are being dragged off by coyotes. The college kid obviously went wacko and killed his sweetie—tragic, but it happens.
    And Willa Luce—well, she’d probably just kept right on going that night, walked out to the highway and caught a ride with a trucker going west, going anywhere but here. Hadn’t Ruthie herself spent years fantasizing about doing the exact same thing? What kid in West Hall hadn’t? There just wasn’t anything here that begged you to stick around—the world’s smallest grocery store, grungy