Winterwood

“You found the watch in the woods?” Mr. Perkins asks. I can tell he’s starting to worry, the creases deepening along his jaw, around his weary, tired eyes.

“I found a boy,” I clarify. “And he had the watch hidden in his pocket.”

“And you think he did something to the boy who died?”

I pull my lips in, not wanting to answer.

Mr. Perkins leans forward, his hands quivering in his lap, arthritis in the joints. “Many miners died in these mountains over the years,” he says, facing the flames. “A felled tree once crushed a miner’s tent, flattened him where he slept. Some miners broke through the ice on the river and drowned, some got lost in those woods and froze to death, their bodies recovered in spring. But mostly, the men killed one another over gold claims and theft. Those woods up there are dangerous,” he says, nodding up at me, knowing that I understand, “but not as dangerous as the men themselves.”

I know what he’s saying: There is more to fear in men’s hearts than in those trees.

He leans back in the chair, his eyes clouding over, like he’s drifting into a dream or a memory. “Some say they still wander the lake and the forest, lost, not realizing they’re dead.”

I feel cold suddenly, even though sweat drips from my temples. I think of the boys at the bonfire, how they said they heard voices, something in their cabin, in the trees. Not the voices of miners, but maybe something else. Someone else.

Max.

“Those early settlers were superstitious,” he adds, circling around a point he’s trying to make but not quite getting there. “They would make offerings to the trees, to the mountains.” He taps a finger against the chair, his expression turned serious. “They thought it would appease the darkness that lived in the Wicker Woods. They dropped their most precious items into the lake, letting the water swallow them up. They believed the lake was the center of everything, the beating heart of the wilderness.”

“Did it work?” I ask, feeling like a little girl asking about a bedtime story, a fairytale that was never real. “Did it calm the woods?”

His eyes squint nearly closed, mulling over the question. “Perhaps. Who’s to say where a bottomless lake might end.” He pushes up from the rocking chair and walks to one of the front windows, looking out at the frozen lake, a cluster of empty summer homes, and a boys’ camp across the way. “But you can’t always blame the Wicker Woods,” he adds, “for the bad things that happen.”

I push my hands into my pockets and look past him through the window, at an ocean of spiky green trees for as far as I can see. And beyond, the snow capped mountains poking up into the dark clouds. A place that is rugged and wild. Where bad things happen.

A boy goes missing.

A boy dies.

Who’s to blame?

The morning sun breaks through the clouds, and for a brief moment it passes through every window in Mr. Perkins’s home—illuminating every dark corner, every dust mote tumbling across the wood floor, the stacks of books lining the walls, the old picture frames hanging from bent nails, the cobwebs sagging between the rafters like silky ribbons.

I had hoped for something in coming here, but I’m not sure what. Answers to the wrong questions, answers that Mr. Perkins doesn’t have. If my grandmother was alive, I would go to her and she would draw me into her broad arms and hum a melody only she knew until I drifted off to sleep. And in my dreams, she would whisper answers to all the things I needed to know. When I woke, my heart would feel clear and raw and new, a feeling like being untethered. A dizziness that made you want to laugh.

But she is gone and my mom is not here and all I have is Mr. Perkins.

I am alone.

“Thanks,” I tell him, my voice solemn. I walk through clouds of heat to the front door and pull it open. I feel weighted and worthless and adrift. A Walker who doesn’t know what she should do next. Who to trust.

Before I can escape out into the cold, Mr. Perkins clears his throat, now standing behind me. “A moth follows you,” he says.

My eyes lift to see a white bone moth skimming along the porch roof.

My heart stills in my chest—afraid to move.

“I’ve seen it many times now,” I say softly, the cold cutting through me. The truth I can’t avoid.

“And you know what it means?” he asks from the doorway.

My jaw clenches, and when I open my mouth to speak, I feel the stiff edge along each word. “Death is coming.”

Mr. Perkins’s hands begin to tremble again. “It means you don’t have much time.”

I swallow and look back at him, his expression grim, as if I were the one who was closer to death, not him. A sharp chill settled in the air between us.

“Be careful,” he says at last, turning his gaze to the fireplace—nothing else to be said. That could be said. My fate already decided.

Death is coming for me.