“Oh, they’re real, all right,” their mother said. She was quiet again for a moment, then continued.
“Anyway, we made it back to the house. Your father—he thought we should go, he thought we should get as far away as we could, as quick as we could. But I felt we needed to try to do something—to find a way to protect people from her, to keep what had happened to Tom and Bridget from ever happening again. I convinced him. For better or for worse.” She paused again, broke apart her banana bread, pushed the pieces around on her plate.
“She came back that evening.”
“Who?” Ruthie asked.
“Gertie. I heard a scrabbling in the closet upstairs and opened the door, and there she was. I thought I would die of fright, but Gertie looked so … so sorry almost, so sad and alone. She couldn’t help what she was. So I talked to her. I made a deal with her. If we stayed, your father and I would visit her in the cave. We would keep her company, bring her gifts, help her find a way to get food, but she needed to promise that she would never hurt us. She can’t speak—I don’t think any of them can. But she nodded, even smiled at me.”
Ruthie nodded numbly, still not quite able to believe the fantastical story her mother was telling. “So you’re basically saying you adopted two little girls that day?”
“Yes,” her mother said. “Only one was a much bigger burden and responsibility. I believed that it was up to us to help her, and to keep the world safe from her. I also believed that it was our responsibility—your father’s and mine—to make sure no one else could make another sleeper. We had to keep the knowledge safely guarded.”
“So the journal pages weren’t destroyed?” Katherine asked. “You had them the whole time?”
Candace had been right about this part. She’d gotten her proof in the end, but had died for it.
Ruthie’s mother shook her head. “The pages weren’t ours to destroy. It didn’t seem right. So we hid them in the caves, with Gertie to guard them, and told Candace they were gone—she only wanted to sell them, to make money. We knew there were more pages out there, the final instructions and map, and that one day they would surface.”
“Gary found them,” Katherine said. She looked very tired and horribly pale—her whole face, even her lips, washed of color. “And he showed up here with them. He had Auntie’s original letter to Sara, and the map she’d drawn showing the location of the portal in the cave.”
Ruthie’s mother nodded. “He came to the house after he’d found the cave—the map had led him right to it. He’d seen Gertie out there. Taken her picture. He knew everything. And he was absolutely determined that he was going to go home and pick up something of your son’s, then return and do the spell to bring him back. He wouldn’t take no for an answer. I tried to explain to him what would happen—what a nightmare it would be. But he was determined. I begged him to talk it over with me some more. We went to lunch in town. I tried everything I could think of to dissuade him. I told him everything about Gertie. Hell, I even offered him money—not that I had any to give. But he’d made up his mind.”
Katherine turned the ring on her finger, the one she wore above her gold wedding band. Auntie’s ring.
Ruthie’s mother rubbed her eyes. “I followed him out of town that afternoon. I didn’t know what else to do. I thought maybe I could get him to pull over, that I’d find some way to get him to change his mind. I couldn’t let him go back to Boston with those photographs. If he told anyone, if word got out …”
Mom hung her head, her whole body slumping forward, broken. Fawn looked from her mother to Ruthie, then over to Katherine, perplexed.
“He was driving so fast. Maybe if I hadn’t been following so close …”
“You … you saw him crash?” Katherine said, swaying a little in her chair as the weight of the words hit her. She put a hand on the table to steady herself.
Ruthie’s mother nodded and looked down at her hands, lying flat on the table. “He was just ahead of me, going around a bend. He took the corner too fast and just lost control. It all happened so quickly; there was no stopping it.
“I pulled over and ran to his car, but as soon as I got there, I knew there was nothing I could do. He was gone.”
Katherine made a quiet sobbing sound and put her face in her hands.
“His backpack was there, on the passenger seat, beside him. Before I could think about it too much, I reached in and took it.”