Didn’t take long for Adelaide to regret this decision. After twenty minutes Adelaide felt as if she might have to crawl the whole way. The wind wouldn’t let her keep balanced. She at first felt the buffeting as malevolence, the wind as a force bent on killing her, but after half an hour she saw the folly of such thinking. This land overpowered people, but it hadn’t come to them, they had come to it. It wasn’t trying to kill them; it didn’t even notice them.
Adelaide stopped to adjust her wool scarf, pull it tighter across her mouth and nose, but it made no difference. She wore gloves. Boots. Two layers of clothing and then her great coat but she might as well be skipping around in her slip, that’s how chilled she felt.
After another hour—or had it only been ten more minutes?—it seemed like she’d hardly left her cabin behind. So tough to judge scale and distance out here. Did she have two more miles to go or five? Five hundred, it felt like. She’d brought water and pilot bread on this walk, what her father would’ve dismissed as “dog biscuits.” She crouched down to eat and drink, hunched over like a caveman.
By the second hour she felt nearly delirious. The cold turned her forehead and the bridge of her nose raw. She couldn’t feel her nose or lips, even with the scarf for protection. She should’ve invested in a horse as soon as she’d arrived, but she’d become used to having people come to her—Grace and Matthew and the other men who visited. And each day there were fifteen things to do right there on the property. All excuses. All ways she proved herself unable to live on her own, to become a grown woman.
“You surprised me.”
That was Eleanor Henry speaking. She walked beside Adelaide, calm as could be.
But Adelaide’s mother wore only her nightgown, and the flesh across her chest and neck had been slashed to ribbons, the muscles underneath raw and nearly purple. Because her throat had been torn open, her voice didn’t sound quite the same. A faint, gasping aspect to it. The woman walked on bare feet.
Adelaide didn’t startle at the haint beside her. She’d felt this woman walking beside her since the moment she’d fled the farm.
“I told you to stay out the barn,” Eleanor said.
“I tried to stay away,” Adelaide whispered. “But I heard you…”
“Screaming,” Eleanor finished.
Adelaide nodded. “After I heard you and Daddy both screaming, I tried to stop it.”
Eleanor laughed, but the sound had no warmth in it. It nearly sounded like howling when it played through the holes in her flesh.
“Is that what happened?” Eleanor asked.
Adelaide didn’t answer her mother and her mother’s dead eyes never left Adelaide’s face.
“Maybe you didn’t want to stop it,” Eleanor hissed. “Not until we were dead.”
The words hit her harder than the wind. She stooped forward, bracing herself against the hurt.
“You and the demon,” Eleanor said. “The best thing and the worst thing, both came to us the same morning. You ever wondered why?”
Of course she had. Nearly every day since she’d been old enough to understand the symmetry.
“Why that day?” Adelaide asked her mother, just to talk about something else. “Why’d you two go into the barn with the shotgun that day?”
Eleanor slowed her pace until she came to a stop, but Adelaide kept going.
“We got tired of keeping secrets,” Eleanor called after her. “You feeling tired yet?”
She looked back to answer her mother, but her mother was gone.
When she turned around again, she slammed face-first into the side of Grace’s cabin.