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COUSIN NANCY REMEMBERS
Each night after Summer had gone missing, I got down on my knees and prayed. And each morning before opening the post office, I went to church for confession. Father O’Hare looked annoyed to see me again, entering his side of the confessional with a heavy sigh. I knew he was tired of hearing me say the same thing.
But I never stopped praying. Or confessing.
Never.
Else how would I ever be able to explain it to Ada Mae when we met in heaven? Church doctrine aside, I just knew that’s where she and that precious baby boy were.
As for where Summer was, well, I refused to believe that she was in heaven with them. Not yet. I would have known it in my heart. I would have felt the pain of it under my breastbone. No, not dead, but surely taken, probably hurt, terrified, beaten down, confined. I couldn’t think enough bad thoughts, which the priest dismissed by giving me some Our Fathers and Hail Marys, more and more each day.
When Charlie Hatfield finally got around to asking Stepmama in the second week that Summer was gone, the witch said she’d run off with a boy she’d met at church; she didn’t rightly know his name. And that of course she’d hired a private detective to find them and bring them back though she didn’t offer up his name and number.
“But if they’ve gone and gotten married,” she said in a tight voice, “I expect Snow is no different than her mother, Ada Mae.”
In that way, she condemned both of them in a single breath, which to me meant she was condemning herself.
And silly old Charlie Hatfield fell under her spell even as she spoke, and didn’t do anything more about it except send around notices to the towns closest to us to be on the lookout for a girl in a blue dress.
No amount of my telling Charlie that Summer wasn’t the kind of girl to run off with a boy she just met made an ounce of difference. He was set on believing the witch.
“And don’t you come around here with your fairy stories anymore, Nan,” he said to me, wagging his finger at me as if he was my pa instead of the little old fat boy in our class who’d never had a single friend because he was a squealer and mean besides.
And that was that, except for my prayers, till a man out walking his dog on the far side of Elk Mountain found a torn piece of Summer’s blue dress and the ribbon that had been about her waist. They were in a meadow overrun with bear tracks and fresh scat, and much too far from any town for her to have gotten there by any means other than bad business. Though by then—since it had been raining for days—the trail had gone cold. And even a pair of prize bloodhounds brought in from Buckhannon couldn’t find Summer’s scent.