Her Sisters Took Everything — Beneath the Floor, Her Mother Hid a Lifeline

Chapter 2

The woman on the step was maybe seventy. White hair pulled into a knot. A heavy gray shawl. A walking stick worn smooth at the top by a thumb that had gripped it for decades. She looked Ren up and down slowly, then nodded once, as if confirming something she had already half-believed.

—You have her eyes.

She walked past Ren into the cabin. She looked at the open trap door. At the wool blanket. At the notebook lying beside the candle. She did not look surprised by any of it. She lowered herself onto the stool by the stove, set her walking stick across her knees, and said simply:

—She told me she’d be leaving you a project. I helped carry the lime up here in 1883. My back hasn’t been the same since.

Ren stared at her.

—She wasn’t alone, Hattie said. Three words. *She wasn’t alone.*

There were others, the old woman said. Others who knew. Others who needed. A network of women who had been passing messages and hiding each other for nearly twenty years — and Cora Hadley had been its heart.

—Your mother watched the winters for twenty years, Hattie said. She watched the rings on the cedar stumps. She watched the geese. This summer, they came south six weeks early. The squirrels stripped the oaks bare. The cedar growth this year was twice as thick as last year’s.

—What does that mean?

—It means a winter is coming this country hasn’t seen since before either of us was born.

Ren felt the warm air rising from the open trap door against her back. She thought of forty-three jars. For one person. That was too much. For two, it was enough to share. For a family, it was barely a beginning.

—How many? she asked. Does she expect to come?

Hattie did not answer directly. She stood, picked up her walking stick, and walked to the door.

—Get some sleep, child. We have a great deal of work to do and not much time to do it in.

At the door, she paused and turned back.

—There is one thing you should know tonight. Before anything else. Your mother thought someone had been watching the cabin these last months. She did not know who. But she was certain.

The old woman’s voice dropped — not from fear, from precision.

—Whoever it was, they knew about the cellar. And they were waiting for her to die.