Alma Katsu - The Taker

My father came back inside, his expression grim. “Get dressed, Nevin. You must come with me,” he said to the groaning lump in the bed downstairs.

“Must I?” I heard my brother ask in a voice heavy with sleep. “There’s the cattle to feed-”

“I’ll go with you, Father,” I called down from the loft, pulling on my clothing hastily. My heart was already beating so hard that it would be impossible to remain in the house and wait for news of what had happened. I had to go with my father.

A snow had fallen in the night, the first of the season, and I tried to clear my mind as I walked behind Father, concentrating only on stepping into the footsteps he made in the fresh snow. My breath hung in the crisp air and a drop of mucus beaded on the tip of my nose.

Sitting in the hollow before us was the Jacobses’ farm, a brown saltbox on the broad expanse of white snow. People had begun to congregate, distant small dark shapes against the snow, and more were coming to the farm from every direction, on foot and on horseback; the sight made my heart start to race again.

“We’re going to the Jacobses’?” I asked of my father’s back.

“Yes, Lanore.” A taciturn reply, with his customary economy of words.

I could barely contain my anxiety. “What do you think has happened?”

“I expect we’ll find out,” he said patiently.

There was a representative present from every family-except the St. Andrews, but they lived at the farthest reach of town and could scarcely have heard the shot-everyone in mismatching layers of dress: dressing gowns, uneven hems of a nightshirt peeking out from beneath a coat, hair uncombed. I followed my father through the small crowd until we’d nudged our way to the front door, where Jeremiah kneeled in the muddied, chopped snow. He’d obviously shoved himself hastily into breeches, boots unlaced on his feet, and a quilt draped over his shoulders. His ancient blunderbuss, the gun that had fired the alarm, leaned against the clapboard siding. His great ugly face contorted in agony, his eyes red, his lips cracked and bleeding. He was usually such an emotionless man that the sight was unnerving.

Pastor Gilbert pushed his way to the front, then crouched low so he could speak softly into Jeremiah’s ear. “What is it, Jeremiah? Why did you sound the alarm?”

“She’s missing, Pastor…”

“Missing?”

“Sophia, Pastor. She’s gone.”

The hush of his voice sent a wave of murmurs through the crowd, everyone whispering to the person on either side of them, except for me and my father.

“Gone?” Gilbert placed his hands on Jeremiah’s cheeks, cradling his face. “What do you mean, she is gone?”

“She is gone, or someone has taken her. When I awoke, she was not in our home. Not in the farmyard, not in the barn. Her cloak is gone but her other things are still here.”

Hearing that Sophia-angry, perhaps feeling she had naught to lose-had not revealed my visit to Jeremiah eased a tightness in my chest that I hadn’t realized was there. At that moment, may God forgive me, I was worried not so much for a woman wandering bereft in the great woods as I was for my own part in her undoing.

Gilbert shook his white head. “Jeremiah, surely she has just stepped out for a bit, a walk perhaps. She will be home soon and sorry to have caused her husband worry.” But even as he spoke, we all knew he was mistaken. No one went walking for recreation in weather this cold, first thing in the morning.

“Calm yourself, Jeremiah. Let us take you inside, to warm yourself before you get a bone chill… Stay here with Mrs. Gilbert and Miss Hibbins, they’ll see to you while the rest of us search for Sophia-won’t we, neighbors?” Gilbert said with false enthusiasm as he helped the big man to his feet and turned to the rest of us. Speculation passed in the sideways glances of husband to wife, neighbor to neighbor-so the new bride has left her husband?-but no one had the heart to do anything but take up the pastor’s suggestion. The two women escorted Jeremiah, stumbling and dazed, into his house and the rest of us broke up into groups. We looked for a line of footprints in the snow leading away from the house, hoping that Sophia’s path had not been trampled by those who had answered Jeremiah’s shot.

My father found one set of tiny footprints that could have been Sophia’s and the two of us began to trace her steps. With my eyes trained on the snow, my mind raced ahead, wondering what had drawn Sophia from her house. Perhaps Sophia had stewed over my words all night and woke with her mind made up, to have it out with Jonathan. How could our confrontation not have something to do with her disappearance? My heart beat fiercely as we followed the footprints that I feared would lead to the St. Andrews’ house, until the snow disappeared in the deeper woods and with it, Sophia’s tracks.

Now we followed no discernible path, my father and I, the forest floor a dizzying patchwork of bare, hard ground and thinly scattered scabs of snow and dead leaves. I had no idea if my father was picking up telltale signs of Sophia’s path-snapped branches, crushed leaves-or if he pushed on out of a sense of duty. We traveled parallel to the river, the sound of the Allagash to my left. Usually I thought the sound of water rushing over rock comforting, but not today.

Sophia had to have been moved strongly by something to venture into the woods by herself. Only the hardiest villagers went into the forest alone because it was easy to lose your way in the sameness. Acre after acre of forest unfurled in a repetition of birch and spruce and pine, and the regularity of boulders pushing their way up through the forest floor, all covered with extravagant mosses or crackled with celadon lichens.

Maybe I should have spoken to my father earlier, to let him know that his neighborly sacrifice was unnecessary and that in all likelihood Sophia had gone to see a man, a man whose company she should not keep. She could be safe and warm in a room with this man while we tramped through the cold and damp. I pictured Sophia rushing along the trail, stealing away from her unhappy home to Jonathan, tenderhearted and confused, who would undoubtedly take her in. My stomach twisted at the thought of her tucked in Jonathan’s bed, the thought that she had won and I had lost and that Jonathan was now hers.

Eventually we turned toward the river and walked a ways, following its contours. My father paused at one point, breaking a hole through a thin patch of ice to dip his hand in for a drink. Between sips, he eyed me not without curiosity.

“I don’t know how much longer we will need to search. You can go home now, Lanore. This is no place for a girl. You must be freezing with cold.”

I shook my head. “No, no, Father, I’d like to keep on a while longer…” It would be impossible to wait at home for news. I would go out of my mind or abandon all propriety to race to Jonathan’s house and confront Sophia. I could picture her, smug, triumphant. At that moment, I don’t think I’d hated anyone as much as I hated her.

It was Father who spotted her first. He had been scanning the way ahead while I had kept my eyes trained on the dizzying ground underfoot. He found the frozen body trapped in an eddy formed by a fallen tree, almost hidden in a tangle of reeds and wild vines. She floated prone, caught in a mass of frozen cattails, her delicate body outstretched, the folds of her skirt and her long hair bobbing on the surface of the water. Her cloak sat on the riverbank, neatly folded.

“Look away, girl,” my father said as he tried to turn me by the shoulders. I couldn’t tear my eyes from her.

Father sounded the call while I stared dumbly at her corpse. Other searchers came crashing through the woods, following my father’s voice. Two of the men waded into the frigid water to pull her body from the embrace of the frozen grasses and the thin shelf of ice that had started to claim her. We spread her cape on the ground and laid her body on it, the sodden fabric clinging to her legs and torso. Her skin was blue all over and her eyes, mercifully, were closed.